JoomlaDay Sydney is over and it feels like I missed the entire event! I can't remember what happened now but fortunately for me I did audio recordings with various people at the event so I can edit them, play them back and share with the rest of the Joomla community.
This episode I have a look at what happened at JoomlaDay Sydney 2013 as well as an interview with Norm Douglas who was one of the presenters at the event.
Norm joins me to talk about his highlight of the event as well as some other aspects such as his migrator extension that allows for quick and easy migration of a Joomla 1.5 website to another version of Joomla.
Show Notes
One of the highlights from the weekend was a Skype hook up with one of the other JoomlaDays in Johannesburg.
You have to excuse the audio quality of this recording, the Australian side were a little tipsy already as we had been drinking for several hours already.
Blog posts from around the web about JoomlaDay Sydney 2013
JoomlaDay Sydney 2013
This first blog post comes from James Weir, he writes about his experiences from the 2.5 days and what he got out of the event. He mentions how grateful he was to have Adrien and Nicolas come over from France to talk to and meet some users of their software. http://linkir.net/blog/28-joomla-day-sydney-2013
Joomla World Conference Coupon Code
Don't forget the coupon code for Joomla World Conference.
Interview with Norm Douglas at Joomla Day Sydney 2013
I talk to Norm in regards to his presentation on upgrading Joomla 1.5 websites. Also you can check out ep28, where I go over a few different methods on upgrading your site.
His favourite part of the weekend was the SiteGround presentation on performance, in particular the PageSpeed Module by Google. He also makes note that is interesting to learn about the practices that SiteGround have in place and comparing these to Norm's own practices.
The extension that Norm's company have been working on is a migration tool to upgrade from Joomla 1.5. He suggests planning for a migration, and to consider that not every site needs to be migrated. The bottom line is that it isn't a one button process.
The tool has the ability to complete the migration all at once but also the ability to migrate step by step, if you would like. Another requirement for the tool was that the content to be migrated wasn't all junk. Which meant developing an easy format to give the client and in this case, export in csv. The engine that was wrote was terrific but then a huge website with a very large database (over half a million articles) caused it to break. After a re-build, the tool is back in action and now has an on screen feedback during the processing time, a detailed log at completion and also a log during the process.
In addition to all the functionality, the migration tool has the ability to add extensions quickly and easily including K2, JomSocial and Community builder. When importing your articles it gives you the option of importing articles into categories and changing categories around if you would like to.
After a thought from the team about migrating from K2 items to Joomla articles, they included this into the component. Which allows you to change items in Joomla 1.5 into articles for Joomla 2.5.
In regards to e-commerce functionality, it will allow you to import from Virtuemart as long as there is an upgrade path for the component. Norm suggests using MijoShop as he has never had any issues with it and it has a direct import method.
At jinfinity, Anton and Norm work together to make extensions out of necessity and they need tools to build websites. The extensions are mostly pitched for developers.
50% off any subscription at Jinfinity: SJD2013
(Please note: This coupon code for JInfinity has expired. Please shoot Norm an email and pester him if you want a discount ;) [email protected] )
Follow Norm on Twitter @normdouglas
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