CNP is proud to announce the recent re-launch of a new website for one of our clients, Truthout.org, a large online news organization.  This is the first project CNP has undertaken involving a major migration from Drupal to Joomla!, and it’s been a very exciting process for us!  When we first started this migration, we looked long and hard for any technology or process that we could follow to help us accomplish this, but found none.  So we had to develop this technology and process from scratch.  Here’s a little bit about the challenges and solutions that we found worked best for our migration.

Content Construction

As I’m sure any developer realizes, the content structure and storage in Drupal is radically different than Joomla!, so mapping out each field, what it’s function was, where it appeared, and an equivalent location in Joomla! was crucial.  As you can imagine, Joomla!’s default content component (com_content) just wouldn’t cut it.  With about 15-20 different fields being brought over for every content piece we used the popular K2 Content Construction Kit to help us adapt in a Joomla! environment.  K2’s options like it’s image and media handling, and it’s versatile extrafields options made it much easier to handle content and still preserve good workflow for the editors and staff putting in content.  But we didn’t stop there.  We’ve created several custom extrafield types in order to answer several specific needs for users.

User Management

One of the major requirements for this site was the ability to have author attribution for multiple authors.  This is something that, historically, Joomla! didn’t handle.  Fortunately, CNP Integrations has already tackled this problem for another client also using K2.  Using custom solutions developed by CNP, K2 sites are able to easily select multiple contributors to an article that are then easily displayed in the article itself.  Another factor unique to a site like this was the fact that the contributors must be displayed in order according to the level of their contribution to the article.  Here again CNP developed unique capability to adjust the order in which the contributors/authors are displayed.  Using this makes it much easier to provide accurate attribution for articles with multiple authors or contributors.

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CNP Integrations has developed a revolutionary new tool that can help you migrate Drupal to Joomla!, giving you the power to migrate your website to a stable, versatile platform that combines the power of an extensible framework, with the ease of use of the Joomla! administrator.  With this service provided for any webmaster, you now have the ability to seamlessly magrate, convert, and integrate all of your current data from Drupal, into the award winning Joomla! CMS.

CNP Integrations is now offering this as a service.  This service was developed for you after a proprietary Drupal to Joomla! migration and conversation was made for one of our clients.  This migration resulted in the successful move from a “hacked” Drupal environment, with many modifications made in order to accomplish the sites goals, to a new Joomla! environment where, along with K2, a more sustainable workflow was implemented, with much less customizations required.  This migration successfully ported over 20,000 content pieces, comments for each article, as well as thousands of users for the sites that were migrated.  In our research, this has never been done before.  We could not find any instances of a successful Drupal to Joomla! migration or conversion documented, nevertheless one of this magnitude

Here’s How Our Drupal to Joomla! Migration Works

CNP Integrations developers have analyzed and mapped the entire database structure for Drupal content nodes, and mapped those to Joomla! Content Component, or the K2 Content Kit for those that demand even more flexibility.  From there, our developers can safely migrate all your content directly from your database into a new Joomla! installation.  This has already been done for all of Drupals core content options, meaning you won’t lose anything from your existing content, not even comments!

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One of the fastest growing sectors of the web is e-commerce.  With everyone selling things from ebay, to amazon, and their own sites, e-commerce has become a major factor in developing sites on most Content Management Systems, including Joomla!  Here’s some of the top mistakes we notice people making when building an ecommerce site in Joomla!  Have you done some of these, or maybe have some of your own?  Leave them in the comments, we’d love to hear them!

Site Security

Without of a doubt, one of the biggest concerns for users shopping online is security, especially with the recent round of high profile hacking that has occured over the last year.  And, to be honest, they have good reason to be concerned!  With their financial viability, and their wallets on the line, shopping on a secure site is a legitimate concern!  Unfortunately, most webmasters don’t see it that way.  I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve come across that have minimal levels of security, many ignoring established standards like using SSL Certification to protect their users information.  Want a quick way to lose your business?  Get hacked and lose your customers information!  I think site security tops the list of mistakes that e-commerce site owners overlook, in their site.

Search Optimization

It was hard deciding which was a bigger mistake, Site Security of Search Optimization - but Site Security won because of it’s implications for users.  Regardless, one of the things I notice time and again in sites that I come across and sites I work on is the lack of optimization.  This is not exclusive to Joomla!, webmasters on many platforms overlook this, but we’re looking at Joomla! here.  To be honest, e-commerce sites have a certain level of built-in SEO edge.  The fact that each of their products offer them a unique page that can be optimized to benefit their rankings gives them an immediate edge over other sites who have to build each page from scratch!  This one is an easy one to fix, most shopping carts for Joomla! provide very good SEO capabilities for each product page, just use them!

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When it comes to building an ecommerce site on Joomla!, the options and capabilities are staggering.  Our last post about ecommerce covered the Top Joomla! E-commerce Solutions for different types of ecommerce endeavors.  But opening up shop online is serious business, and there are a lot of things that often get overlooked when it comes to starting a store.  Here’s a couple for getting your Joomla! E-commerce store online successfully!

Getting Paid

One of the most commonly overlooked things for any ecommerce store is, suprisingly, how you get paid!  Not that people forget they want to make money, but exactly how they collect that money from store purchases is often left until the last minute or forgotten all-together.  Obviously there are many ways to get paid - from taking a credit card using a merchant account, or using the popular Paypal services, to the many other checkout services including Google Checkout, 2Checkout, Moneybookers, and Amazon payment gateway just to name a few. Choosing the right services, and, more importantly, the right combination of services is critical, since choosing the wrong ones can leave potential buyers frustrated and stranded, with no easy way to pay for their purchases.

Attracting Visitors

While the old adage of “If you build it, they will come” may work in many areas, but the internet is not one of them.  Just putting together your shop and listing your products is only the beginning of your journey.  Getting your name out there, getting traffic to your site, and keeping the new visitors coming is a never ending process.  Along the way you’ll probably learn something about things like PPC, Adwords, SEO, Affiliates, and Conversions - all important aspects in the world on online marketing.  While you can definitely tackle a lot of things by yourself, and some of them are best left to you as the business owner, having a trusted team that’s been through the process time and again will only give you an edge over the competition.

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I’m not sure if you heard the news or not, but the latest release of Joomla! is out!  Joomla! 1.7 came out just over a week ago on July 19^th and has met some pretty impressive reviews.  In case you haven’t been following, the Joomla! launched a new process for handling releases several months ago with the release of Joomla! 1.6 in January.  The goal was to have a time based release cycle as opposed to the former feature-based release cycle.  This was a big deal.  Joomla! 1.6 was released almost 3 years after 1.5, so the move to a regularly scheduled release cycle was much needed.  So what do you need to know about Joomla! 1.7?

What’s new in Joomla! 1.7

This latest release definitely packs a punch.  While overall the updates weren’t enormous, the specific items represent a huge leap forward for the Joomla! project.  Specifically, the one-click updates.  This is a feature that has been talked about for a while, and it’s finally here!  Previously, updating your site with a minor security release was a hassle, and updating a major release was well-nigh impossible!  With the new update manager in the Joomla! back-end, administrators can now not only update to the latest security release, but even move across major releases with ease!  Needless to say, this saves a lot of headaches for just about everyone.

There are several other updates in this latest release.  Things like adding background images to html modules, the ability to pre-define search terms for menu items, and some other obscure, but important features like an update to the Joomla! installer, including randomizing database table prefixes, which is important for security.

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