Over past couple of years, I have many times seen a bad Joomla site, which either is hacked or is not working as it should, and I have converted those sites to Drupal.
The most strange things is, there is always some Joomla developer, who has created that site, but when problems occur, that Joomla developer is gone.. Strange right? How can one call himself a Joomla developer, when first problems occur, he is gone?
So I got another Joomla site request to perform a Joomla major Upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5.
I thought, hell, why not - let's fix this site, by not converting it to Drupal (As I usually do), but let's stay on Joomla.
Site works, there has been no hackers yet. So I started to do Joomla upgrade. At first I made a minor upgrade, to update Joomla database to latest stable. I was reading a lot Joomla developer forums and blogs, what are they suggestions. In order to perform major upgrade for Joomla, you have to install some mystic upgrade extension... Ok, I did, I followed to all the best practices from Joomla community for upgrading Joomla site... And then.. It sucks.
There is no native way to upgrade multilingual support in Joomla. I spent 2 days figuring out, how the hell get that site back working with multilingual, and no progress.
Joomla is using some really fishy plugin for i18n, called joomfish... Name says everything - it's some fishy plugin...
So screw you Joomla - I set up a new Drupal site, added a Joomla migration module, to import all Joomla articles to site, recreated menus, re-themed theme in less than 6 hours in Drupal.
Some might say - that's because I'm working with Drupal on my everyday basis, that's right. But for me it seems strange - it's easier to perform Joomla to Drupal convert, than perform Joomla - Joomla upgrade.
No more Joomla for me, anymore (well for q few years at least)
If you are looking to perform Joomla to Drupal convert, please drop a comment or contact me.