A CMS is often compared with a foundation of a building. But what happens to a real building if it’s not cared about? The rats move in. The same thing happens with a CMS if it’s not maintained properly. In other words, if you don’t keep your website up to date with the latest upgrades, you potentially leave the door opened for surprises in the form of hackers and other catastrophes.
When it comes to Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 – don’t let the numerical closeness between them mislead you. Joomla 1.6 took three years to develop and huge time has been spent by many developers and enthusiasts from around the world to put it all together. Despite the fact that much of the code is the same as in Joomla 1.5, much of it has been written from the very ground up and gazillion of great core changes have been made. Thus, the upgrade is much more complex procedure than just copying and uploading new files – this is indeed a migration that is not a one-click affair at all.
Joomla 1.6 release tries its best unveiling tons of new functions and features, refined architecture, bug fixes and a variety of other improvements. In fact, there are numerous benefits aiming to improve the Joomla running – too many to list here in a short article. However, here is a few that stand out:
- Productivity improvements – lots of subtle improvements to menus and toolbars (like “Save & New” option) make Joomla 1.6 running just a pleasure.
- Nested categories – sections and categories are now merged into one list and there is no limit to the depth you can build your category trees.
- New permissions – new Joomla allows to specify who can create, edit, published and delete content.
- Search Engine Ordering (SEO) improvements – meta information can now be added to categories and articles, the page title and page heading can be changed separately.
- Multi-language support – the site visitor is now able to switch between languages.
- Integrated trash management – All content now goes to trash before being permanently deleted and this is integrated into each list view.
- 404 redirection – Joomla 1.6 has a plugin to monitor 404 pages and store information about them.
- Semantic HTML markup – Joomla 1.6 finally brings Joomla output into the modern era and dispenses with all those horrible tables that still lurked in dark places.
With all that said, you are probably wondering how to painlessly migrate from 1.5 version of Joomla to 1.6 without getting your hands dirty over mountains of codes and scripts? With so many core changes carried on, it is in fact a huge challenge for ordinary users to overcome it without ringing the bell of a developer. However, with aisite service the process of moving across Joomla versions has become quite manageable even for the greenest of users. Got intrigued? Keep reading:
If you want to save yourself a lot of headaches – make sure you have backup of your current Joomla 1.5 website data. If you have a proper backup it is always possible to revert back if needed.
Install your new Joomla 1.6 website on a previously found hosting provider.
Register your aisite account by providing your username, email and password. Do bear in mind that your Facebook or Google+ accounts may come in handy for this reason.
Connect your websites
To proceed this aim download and install the bridge file on your PC. Once done, connect your Joomla websites via FTP client software. Within FTP dashboard copy the “aisite” folder and paste it into the root directories of your Joomla websites (current and new versions).
Choose migration preferences by activating those you wish to be transferred to Joomla 1.6. Just check the boxes to activate the required ones.
Demo migration is not recommended to skip. It’s a great chance for you to see how the aisite service works and view the migration results.
If you find yourself happy with the results of Demo – its time to start Full migration by pressing the matching button. In some moments, all your Joomla 1.5 content will be upgraded to 1.3. Congratulations!
Despite the fact that it is strongly recommended to upgrade old Joomla versions to the latest ones – there are still users looking to upgrade to Joomla 1.6. In this case aisite online converter is exactly what you need to get the job done without ringing the bell of a developer.
