Moving off Joomla
Joomla 3 is finished.
The upgrade looks a lot like a rebuild.
Security fixes for Joomla 3 ended in August 2023. Getting to 4 or 5 means every extension needs a compatible version and every template override has to survive the jump. If it’s a rebuild either way, why not land somewhere better?
$ foothills audit-the-extensions$ foothills read-the-template-overrides$ foothills pull-content-straight-from-the-database$ foothills map-every-url$ foothills launch-beside-the-old-site-then-switch
Foothills Digital—Sentrello Premier Partner
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- DigitalOcean
- On-premises Linux
- On-premises Windows
Every one of our people holds active certifications on the platforms they work on.
Sentrello is our only partnership. On the clouds, it's our people who hold the certifications. We don't claim a partner tier, and we'll keep saying so until that changes.
Where this usually starts
The site works. Nobody dares touch it
Plenty of Joomla sites are still on 3.x, because the last upgrade attempt broke something and got rolled back.
- The extensions list runs to two screens, and nobody can say which ones still do anything.
- Several were abandoned by their developers and never got a Joomla 4 release.
- The template’s html folder is full of overrides a contractor wrote and nobody documented.
- The pre-update check turns up a page of incompatibilities, so the upgrade slips to next quarter. Again.
- You’re running a public website on a version that stopped getting security fixes in 2023.
What we do instead
We take the content and leave the extensions behind
Re-create forty extensions on a new platform and you’ve got the same problem in a different language. So we read the Joomla database directly for the articles, categories, menus, users and custom fields, and work out what each extension was actually doing for you. Most of those jobs turn out to be a content type or a field on Strapi, Payload or a custom build. The overrides get read line by line, since that’s where the undocumented business rules tend to hide.
How it works
How a Joomla move goes
Audit the extensions
Every component, module and plugin, listed with what it does, whether anyone still maintains it, and what replaces it. Expect the list to shrink a long way.
Read the template overrides
Each override gets compared against the core layout it replaced, so we know exactly what somebody changed and why it mattered to the page.
Pull content straight from the database
Articles, tags, menus and custom fields come out of the tables, not off the front end. Nothing’s scraped, and nothing gets lost to a layout.
Map every URL
SEF paths, menu aliases, and the old index.php?option= links still sitting in search results. All of them redirect one to one, checked as a build gate.
Launch beside the old site, then switch
The new site runs alongside Joomla until it’s proved itself. DNS moves last, and we can move it back.
What we carry over
Articles, categories and tags
Straight from the database with their dates, authors and ordering intact, into a content model built around what you publish.
Menus and site structure
Joomla’s menu tree quietly decides a lot of your URLs and layouts. We rebuild it as plain navigation, so changing it later doesn’t mean picking a menu item type.
Users and access levels
Registered users and their groups, carried across where the new platform needs them. Passwords move as hashes where the new system can verify them, and as a planned reset where it can’t.
Custom fields, typed properly
Fields added through Joomla’s own custom fields or a CCK extension become real typed fields, not text blobs somebody has to parse.
The job each extension did
Not the extension itself. A gallery, a booking form or a members-only area becomes part of the new build, or gets retired once you agree it can go.
Every URL, including the ugly ones
The raw index.php links search engines indexed years ago get redirected along with the clean ones. Rankings you spent a decade earning don’t reset on launch day.
Related
Platform Migration
Applications, infrastructure, the legacy system nobody dares switch off, and every CMS from WordPress to Joomla. However old it is and whatever it’s called, if your business runs on it, we can move it.
Application Development
A two-screen booking tool or the system your whole company runs on. One team from the first whiteboard to the fortieth patch, so nobody inherits code they’ve never seen.
Sentrello
Sentrello is a self-hosted, source-available unified business management platform. We’re a Sentrello Premier Partner, and our own invoices, net terms and subscriptions all come out of it.
What broke the last time you tried?
There’s usually one extension or one override that stopped the upgrade, and it’s the right place to start.
Tell us that, your Joomla version and roughly how many articles you have. We’ll tell you where you should land and what the move involves.
- What we arePlan, create, launch, maintain
- What we areSentrello Premier Partner
- What we areEvery quote written for you