Nine Questions When Preparing Clients for Joomla 2.5

The conventional wisdom, since the release of Joomla 1.7, has been as follows:

• If your website is running in Joomla 1.5, and it's working well, keep it running in 1.5 for now. Move the site to Joomla 2.5 next year.
• If you're building a new website, build it in 1.7 if possible, so you'll have an easy migration to 2.5 next year.

The reason Joomla 2.5 is so important is because it's a long-term release. By moving your website to this version of Joomla, you can keep Joomla's version constant for 18 months, without moving to new versions every 6 months or so. This long-term stability is important for most client businesses, who don't want to undergo a major upgrade and testing every 6 months. Since Joomla 1.5 will reach its end of life in April 2012, and since Joomla 2.5 is released in January 2012, it makes sense to move Joomla 1.5 sites directly to Joomla 2.5.

But what about moving those websites to Joomla 2.5? Have you stopped to consider a process for doing this, outside of the technical issues?

My company, 4Web, Inc., has roughly 80 sites we maintain which are currently running in Joomla 1.5. Most of these sites are quite complex, defined by several characteristics including third party extensions, custom templates, hundreds or thousands of pages, and custom extension development. We've recently discussed how we will manage moving these sites to Joomla 2.5 next year, and we've started to think about how the process might happen from a business perspective. Here are some of the questions we've been considering.

See all 9 here: Nine Questions When Preparing Clients for Joomla 2.5