December 11, 2007
Migrating to Joomla from Mambo
Back in the day I did quite a few Mambo sites. Although I now prefer Drupal for many good reasons, Mambo remains a popular Content Management System (CMS). A few years back there was a split in the open source Mambo community which resulted in the entire development team leaving. They forked the code and created Joomla, which was recently voted 2007’s Best PHP Open Source CMS winner(Drupal won for the Overall Open Source CMS category).
Anyway, I have a Mambo site which I needed to upgrade to Joomla this week. The process is fairly simple, and it outlined at http://help.joomla.org/content/view/818/181/ I’ll summarise:
- Backup everything – Mambo files and Joomla files.
- Upgrade Mambo to latest version (4.5.2 or 4.5.2.3 – either works)
- Upload latest Joomla files and overwrite Mambo files (but don’t upload the “installation” folder)
- In the installation/sql folder there’s a file – migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql. Execute it as a sql query in phpMyAdmin – this will upgrade your database to a Joomla database.
And you should be good to go. I didn’t need to change anything in my Mambo template for it to work on Joomla – hopefully this is the case for you too.
Comments(3)
Roger Saner is a web platform developer (using 
Drupal and Joomla has in the my experience been measured up against each other on numerous occasions. Personally, I could never truly motivate my personal preference of Drupal over Joomla, apart from the truly powerful taxonomy feature set in core. At the time, I also never really came across a Joomla site with proper standards compliant mark-up – which might entirely be due to end-user and not the platform itself.
I’d be interested to hear your personal preferences, as I don’t have much Joomla experience (apart from installing it once).
Joomla is easy to throw a site up with and there are a stack of plugins, most of which work quite well. The functionality is divided into components (like a gallery or shopping cart or “contact us”), modules (which are like Drupal’s blocks – bit of functional code which can be placed all over the page in certain placeholders), and mambots (which process content, like hiding email addresses using javascript). It also comes with a menu system – which can be quite powerful in terms of navigation: content can be set up within sections, sections contain categories – so we could just view a category if we want to – or just link directly to the content.
Most Joomla sites I’ve played with use tables for layout, but that’s exclusively a template (Joomla-speak for Drupal’s “theme”) issue. The trick with developing a Joomla site is to not make it look like a Joomla site – which a lot of South Africans seem to ignore.
Drupal has some big advantages over Joomla in that it lets you define user roles and permissions (these are both hard-coded in Joomla). It also deals with content input and display in a better way (a vanilla Joomla install won’t let you version your content) – there isn’t anything in Joomla approaching Drupal’s views. For instance, try displaying all blog posts authored by a certain person in the last 3 months and there are going to be issues!
Joomla also has set content input (title, intro, main body) – you can’t build your own content types like you can with CCK in Drupal.
The SEO solutions in Joomla are…not great. I’ve just spent a few hours rebuilding the url’s in a site after switching away from an unsupported SEO component – 404sef. It worked ok, and the new one is also that – just ok. There’s no capacity to build urls based on what sort of content you’re submitting, or to insert dates into only cetain types of urls. With Joomla SEO, it’s all or nothing.
That said, Joomla has less of a learning curve than Drupal – Drupal seems to appeal to developer-types who want more control over their website. However, take a look at nlpsa.com – a beautiful site built on Joomla.
This might be an old thread but it was the first one to explain it as simply as possible. I just repeated the steps above and then modded the dist configuration.php script for the new joomla version and it worked right away. Everyone elses sure fire solution failed dismally.
Kudos!!!
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