Migrating to Joomla 1.6

I carried out a quick test to establish the issues in migrating to Joomla1.6 on my local PC. The simple answer is that one shouldn't jump into it if one is not willing to do a considerable amount of work oneself. I used a basic site which used rhuk_milkyway template. Here are the findings:

The JUpgrade actually works quite smoothly if you are converting from Joomla 1.5.22. It successfully creates a new working environment for Joomla1.6 and preserves the 1.5 installation. Basically a new directory is created to hold 1.6 code and the MySql database gets the additional Joomla tables with j16 prefix. In ideal world it should just be required to drop the old tables and directory and point to the new installation. However the life is not that simple.

Firstly, the default templates which Joomla1.6 comes with are not production quality and rhuk_milkyway is not supported. Originally it was envisaged to include this particular template in the production release but the idea was shelved. The net effect is that various menus just disappear as one has to place them in new positions manually. Also the menu items had a value of -1 set in line Link Type Options/Link Image for various menu items. All these had to be manually set which is annoying and cumbersome.

After spending around an hour I had a functional site but it was a crude replica of the 1.5 version. I was not too fussed about extensions at this stage but obviously their availability is a critical decision in choosing to migrate. To get the site fully working I would have been forced to spend a considerable amount of time on CSS. So the bottom line is : "Don't rush in! Access control lists are great but the effort required to migrate is too much at this point in time".