After something like a year of waiting for maturity to strike, I finally took the plunge and moved this site to Joomla 1.5. The key element that had been missing was a 1.5 native JCE Editor (can’t live without it), and since it’s now out, it was time to switch. Migrating? What a monumental pain in the butt. Tenuous at best, and I still can’t believe how much cleanup was required to re-establish categories, article links, images, etc. etc. Definitely *not* something to be undertaken lightly. I’ve still got issues w/ the new UTF-8 character set — weird mutant single quotes here and there, odd chunks of paragraphs and articles simply missing because they had some offending character — and don’t even get me started on the hassles with Danish content containing high-ASCII characters. Grief.
All the same, the 1.5 admin side of things is quite neat, and there are some great new features to play around with. I’m still bummed that they didn’t include a many-to-many option for articles (i.e. the same article flagged for inclusion in multiple categories/sections) and there’s some parameter crap that’s driving me crazy. But overall it’s nice — and most importantly, all the old components and modules are now being released in improved 1.5 versions, and I’m convinced Joomla is set to take off in a big way after waiting around for the protracted birth of 1.5. I’ve got three client sites up on 1.5 already, and they’re proving stable and reliable. Now that I’ve seen what the migration process entails, I’m not going to try to move any of my existing 1.0.15 client sites (tempting as it is), but will wait for the opportunity to rebuild them completely under 1.5 at a later time.
