From Joomla to Dokuwiki

I have some old sites running on Joomla below the magical 1.5 release. That’s sad, I know. And insecure and all. I know.

Last week I started checking out the options to migrate to 1.5 and was **horrified**.

What? Update to the latest 1.0-version from old, unknown sources, because Joomla doesn’t offer 1.0-versions officially anymore?

What? Use a somewhat hacked **migration script** to update some (!) data to a format, 1.5 could (perhaps) reimport?

What? Redesign the template, because template design changed radically between 1.0 and 1.5?

What? Get new extensions for the features I needed, because the old extensions didn’t get ported to 1.5 and I would have to use some sort of weird 1.0-compatible mode?

What? **And all that stuff doesn’t actually work?**

No way.

After my first trouble with these thoughts I took just a smallish look at the 1.5 to 1.6 migration guide.

What? Another clumsy migration script? (But with a nice UI)

What? Testing environment setup instructions?

What? Again, changes in the template design?

What? Again, extensions, that aren’t ported to 1.6 are not migrated by the migration scrit and don’t even fully work?

What? **Another** another migration script?

What? **And all that stuff probably won’t work again?**

You got to be kidding me.

You know, I’ve always been an admirer of [[http://www.dokuwiki|Dokuwiki]] and all the stuff going around with it.

So after that horrifying realizations above an idea rushed through my mind: „Why not migrate these sites to Dokuwiki as a backend instead?“

Think about it. There are a lots of advantages for Dokuwiki compared to Joomla:

* It’s easier to work with! Even customers can work with it after some training (that also would be required when working with Joomla)
* It’s a hell of feature-rich! I check all the features I needed (like MP3-streaming, image galleries, video players, etc.) and they all appeared as working plugins
* It’s easier to manage
* It’s by far less resource-hungry (giving the whole non-requirement of a database server)
* The template enviroment’s also feature-rich, easier to manage and shouldn’t change so drastically over the next few years
* The upgrade process is painless. **Painless**
* It’s well developed and documented
* I fucking **love that thing**

So I tried. I guess, the amount of work was somehow the same compared to the migration from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5, but in the end I had a clean site with nearly the same design and all features (and even better ones) like the original. But in Dokuwiki.

I’m currently migrating my other Joomla 1.0-sites to dokuwiki and will perhaps even migrate the „Joomla 1.5“-one to dokuwiki.

**Update:** As of January 2014 even the Joomla 1.5-site is migrated to dokuwiki!