Upgraded software: cardifftri.net

Cardiff Tri Screenshot
I got stuck into upgrading cardifftri.net‘s content management system from the ageing, crumbling Mambo 4.5.2, through a number of iterations of Mambo (none worked for me), through to Joomla! 1, then on to Joomla! 1.5, and then, finally at the weekend, over to Joomla! 2.5. This is the latest release of this content management system, and I think it came out in February. Up to date!
The upgrade needed all of these little steps and jumps to migrate the database from the old Mambo to the new Joomla!. Some of those steps are quite big ones in terms of the database, and although I had to change comment systems and discarded the old poll data, I was able to bring across almost all of the old articles and all of the comments. I had to do some direct work on the mySQL database to fix a few problems, but we got there in the end. All seems to be working quite well now, and the latest Joomla! is very nice to work with when you get warmed up. The WYSIWYG interfaces are good and work well, and the commenting system now uses Captcha so I can let users register themselves again.
I’m also able to implement things that users have been asking for, which I probably could have done in Mambo but not so cleanly.
For some reason the fixed pages’ content didn’t migrate properly with database upgrades, but I was able to get back into the original database and copy and paste text directly from the table into Joomla! (backup, backup, backup kiddies, and never delete anything)!
The current layout of the frontend (i.e. the current look of the website) uses a freely available template and is not the long term layout or future of cardifftri.net. Others in the club are helping develop the new look for me, which is a great help. I already had the migration path mapped out, and had made some plans and notes for the future look of the website, but nothing was finished. Hopefully we’ll be able to merge all our ideas into something nice and modern that works well.
Best of luck to cardifftri.net for the next 5 years!