I have seen several questions about the release-name of Joomla! 1.5 stable. In Egyptian mythology, Khepri is associated with the dung beetle (kheper), but also was associated with rebirth, renewal, and resurrection (see also the Khepri entry on wikipedia).

Because Joomla! 1.5 is a major re-write we have chosen this name because it perfectly reflects what we have done with Joomla! 1.5.

After the release I said to myself “we have released 1.5, what is next?”, and I am probably not the only one with this question We currently have set nothing in stone, but we are pretty sure about how we want to move forward. Since the initial release of Joomla! 1.0.0 we have been working on Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5. Basically we worked on two branches, but our main focus on terms of maintaining stability was  Joomla! 1.0. When we moved on to Beta and RC status, we saw a shift of focus towards Joomla! 1.5. Maybe I once write a book on what we have done to get us where we are now, but that is of later concern   Now we have released Joomla! 1.5 we have two branches who are in maintenance mode, and we are about to start the process for Joomla! 1.6. A short outline on the versions just mentioned and the ideas/status:

• Joomla! 1.0.x: This branch is in maintenance mode and our latest release is Joomla! 1.0.14 RC1. Currently the 1.0.x forum is checked and the tracker is updated. We know what it takes to get a stable  1.0.14 out. We try to take the same approach as with the last finalization strategy for Joomla! 1.5…we will try to fix all priority 1 and 2 artifacts. Joomla! Bug Squad (JBS)  members are assembled to help out with testing and forum handling etc. After we release a stable version of Joomla! 1.0.14 we will maintain the forum and tracker, and will work on future versions if needed (meaning security issue, or when something is really broken).
• Joomla! 1.5.x: We have put Joomla! 1.5 into maintenance mode, that means the Joomla! Bug Squad (JBS) is working on Joomla! 1.5.1. Not everyone may have noticed a change in approach but we really try to put a process in place where we possibly fix issues slower, but the quality will improve dramatically. The biggest change in our approach is that we only commit solutions after we have tested the patch. The JBS is now 3-4 weeks old and we are now working with this process in place. Not every detail of the new process is in place, and we talk on improving steps within the process. Something that we consider to do is also re-factor parts of the back-end components to MVC, step by step within every maintenance release. We have not yet decided which ones we will re-factor, and how we are going to implement these (possible) changes into the code base. As always we have not set a date for Joomla! 1.5.1 but we expect to be able to release it within 2-4 weeks from now.
• Joomla! 1.6: In earlier discussion we agreed to start with the white paper approach. We are considering to make this method to be open not only for development work-group members, but would like to offer the community the possibility to also send in white papers. The reason we do this is pretty simple. We want to study and rank the proposals, decide which features we are going to include and with that we have a proper design upfront. And we would like to see this to be as much as possible community driven. This gives us the advantage to know what we are going to develop, and most important how we are going to do that. Details on how we are going to organize this will be shared soon.

We soon have 3 branches to maintain, and that is something we never have done before. To make this work we need our community to help out…that’s you! Past weeks we already have seen great community efforts like PBF, the documentation event, Google Highly Open Participation contest and of course the just newly created Joomla! bug Squad. The JBS is not even a month old and there are already around 25 active members. This is a mixed group of members from the development team, documentation, the former Quality & Testing, but also community members and they do an awesome job with scanning the forum/tracker, create and take delivered patches, test them etc. We will keep on investing in these teams because we need you to help out… As you might have seen, no matter what you can do, there is always something you can help with. Joomla! is a very community friendly project, so if you consider helping out, don’t hesitate you will love the experience.

Source: willebil

No doubt if you’ve already got a Joomla! 1.0.x site you’re wondering what it’ll take to get your site to 1.5, you might also be wondering if you can get their third party extensions migrated as well and you may even wonder if its safe to sit on 1.0 for a little while longer until things pan out a bit for this funny 1.5 thing and people start writing new extensions and updating old extensions. So I thought I’d write up some thoughts about migrating to 1.5 and spread some news to help people out.

Migrator Updates
To get started in the land of Migration there has been an update: the migrator tool is now at RC6. Some tutorials on the net have been mistakenly saying you need the same version of Migrator as you do Joomla! release, which is just plain wrong. Earlier migrators will work with later Joomla! releases and vice versa, though really you’re going to want the latest and greatest to get things to behave properly. So the migrator should also work fine regardless of your Joomla! release, but it has been heavily tested from versions 1.0.10 to 1.0.14RC1, so being on at least those releases is the most advisable. Additionally I’ve tested the migrator on Mambo 4.5.2, 4.5.5 and 4.6.3 and have had the import run successfully again the sample data for those sites (note: Mambo isn’t officially supported or fully tested and not all data may be transferred properly). Whilst not all data will be transferred, the core of Mambo hasn’t changed that much so we’re able to use the exact same mgirator with those Mambo releases as Joomla! 1.0, cool!

So whats new with RC6? Well now there is the ability to select which plugins you wish to run (so you can selective export tables) and for the developers there was an addition to the API to make it even easier to alter the SQL automatically generated by the ETLPlugin framework and add SQL before and after a plugin runs. The core_log_* tables have also been removed which for older sites could be quite large tables so this should speed up the creation of dump files.

And the stable migrator? Well if RC6 is holding up pretty well and no issues come up in the next week or so, RC6 is probably going to turn into the Migrator’s stable release. This means from the Migrator side of things I feel I’ve gotten most of the bugs out and its easy to use. The stable will probably have a few more updates with regards to documentation shipped but this should be the only change.

Update PHP version
Where possible upgrade to PHP4.4.x or higher to get the best compatibility. There are known issues with PHP 4.3.x releases (especially with 4.3.9) so upgrading to the latest release will give you less troubles both in migration and with 1.5 in general.

iconv errors
I’ve seen a few iconv errors floating around the place about invalid characters. For the most part things seem to be fine by ignoring them, however they may cause other issues. For the most part if iconv is flagging an issue with something then it would appear that the data has information in it that isn’t quite right. Check your data for any strange characters or use a slightly different encoding and see if you have any issues still.

I’ve also seen some issues with migration that can be solved by going through David Gal’s old guide for UTF-8 in 1.0 on the forum:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?topic=55065.0 so checking that you’ve applied all of the tips, namely the “SET NAMES ‘UTF8′” tip.

Don’t forget the prefix!
The migrator changes the prefix to jos_ regardless of the original site prefix. This was done to normalise the prefix. This doesn’t mean you can’t use a different prefix in your 1.5 database but when it comes to migration the “old prefix” is “jos_”. Additionally it doesn’t mean that you can’t export a site if you don’t have a ‘jos_’ prefix, it just means that the migrator dump file will always use the ‘jos_’ prefix.

Memory and time
If you have the ability to, give your PHP process more memory and execution time during migration. This will allow the system to create and load dumps faster if you can increases these limtis and will reduce the number of page reloads to avoid exceeding time or memory limits. Whilst the migration systems attempt to do their best, giving it some breathing room also helps. This is especially relevant for larger Joomla! instances!

Misbehaving 1.0 extensions
Before migrating, create a small 1.5 test installation and install your 1.0 extensions on to it and test with using legacy mode or not. Some extensions that do not work properly with 1.5 at the moment are mod_pda and Joombackup, both of which from reports on the forum cause Joomla! not to load properly. Not all extensions will be supported in 1.5, so its handy to test it on a vanilla (non migrated) 1.5 site to see how they behave before attempting to migrate your 1.0 site.

The tortoise or the hare?
Joomla! 1.0 support isn’t going to disappear the moment 1.5 is released, which means you don’t have to race to get to 1.5 and get everything updated. You can wait a while on 1.0 until updates to your extensions are 1.5 compatible. What you might gain from waiting is better third party support for your extensions and an easier migration pathway. If you are just using the Core of Joomla! then it is easy to upgrade to 1.5, but if you heavily rely on third party extensions then you might want to get in touch with their developers about writing migration plugins and 1.5 versions of their extensions.

SEF
In Joomla! 1.5 we’ve updated the SEF to behave a lot better, but that makes it different to 1.0’s style. For those who haven’t installed a third party SEF solution in 1.0, then you can merely enable the Legacy Plugin (with legacy routing) and the Backlink Migration plugin in 1.5 to have approximately 90% of 1.0 SEF URL’s routed appropriately. If you have a third party SEF extension, the backlink migration system will build a list of SEF links from your menus. This means that any link that is in your menu should be transferred properly, even if you have third party SEF, but not all links will be transferred.

File permissions
If you’re doing a migration make sure you give Apache write access to installation/sql/migration/ and ensure you’ve got a temporary directory set up and writeable (e.g. /tmp) for the migrator to use. The migrator alters the dump file before it imports it into 1.5 to handle things such as different prefixes and transliteration. It is important that you make these directories writeable.

Manual insertion
Whilst this is certainly the hardest way of doing things, you can also manually insert most tables from the dump file into Joomla!. You will have to take care of manually renaming any key values to ensure that there aren’t any clashes. I’m not quite sure what the best and easiest way to do this is, but it would be possible if you have an existing 1.5 site and want to insert content from your old site into it. The only table that this won’t work for is the menu table, this has to be handled specifically via the 1.5 migration process.

Core hacks and modifications
The migrator doesn’t support core hacks or modifications to the core database tables. If you have installed anything like a bridge to the system that modifies the core tables then these will not migrate properly. The migrator is designed to handle the core tables as they are, not in their modified form. Contact the creator of the bridge to acquire migrator plugins approriate to your tables (you can override the core plugins by putting your own over the top) if you want to migrate a modified site.

Migration Errors
If you encounter an error half way through migration, the system won’t let you attempt to migrate again because your database might be in an inconsistent state (hey, it had an error!). This means that if you get an error during migration you will need to start the entire 1.5 install again to get a clean database and the system will then allow you to try to migrate again.

Source: pasamio

Cleanup is done, Joomlacode is up.
With recent changes in both boxes configuration all seems to work a bit more smooth then before, both boxes are up for more then 2 days now and load seems stable. You shouldn’t experience any issues but in case of questions/problems please post ‘em here.
Enjoy!
asd

Source: facedancer

While some issues that Brad found lately made JoomlaCode a lot more stable there are still some things to clean up there. On friday night, 25 Jan 22:00 GMT +1 JoomlaCode servers will go offline for 6 hours. I’ll be doing some serious cleanup of JoomlaCode database which should cause another performance boost.
Anyway, since we’re almost ‘back to normal’ with JoomlaCode, if you’ll experience any problems with it please report it on JoomlaCode section of the forum.
To decrease load even more we’ll clean up download statistics too. I put ‘em back as fast as possible which means a week or two.

In case you’re invited to Joomla! 1.5 install party on friday night please obtain install package earlier

To check your local time please go here.

Source: facedancer