TBSC consulting - upgrade from Joomla to Drupal

<p>TBSC consulting approached me for help - to help them out to secure their existing site, which was built on Joomla.</p><p>As a true Drupaller I offered them - can we switch CMS from Joomla to Drupal? And they agreed. Here is what we got:</p><p><img src="http://www.reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/tbscfrontpage.jpeg&quot; alt="TBSC Consulting Front Page" title="TBSC Consulting Front Page" width="1200" height="1135"></p><p><em>TBSC Consulting Front Page</em></p><p>This site is built with help of some standard Drupal modules, and is availiable in two languages (English and Georgian)</p><p><img src="http://www.reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/tbsc-georgian.jpeg&quot; alt="TBSC Georgian" title="TBSC Georgian" width="1165" height="1200"></p><p><em>TBSC Georgian</em></p><p>Although work on this site didn't request a lot of creativity - we were doing just migration of site, technical things were pretty harsh - main problem was to extract content and users from existing Joomla site, and then import it to Drupal site. But before that - here is a scenario which led me to suggest Drupal over Joomla:</p><blockquote><p><strong>So I got another Joomla site request to perform a Joomla major Upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5.&nbsp;</strong></p><p>I thought, hell, why not - let's fix this site, by not converting it to Drupal (As I usually do), but let's stay on Joomla.</p><p>Site works, there has been no hackers yet. So I started to do Joomla upgrade. At first I made a minor upgrade, to update Joomla database to latest stable. I was reading a lot Joomla developer forums and blogs, what are they suggestions. In order to perform major upgrade for Joomla, you have to install some mystic upgrade extension... Ok, i did, I followed to all the best practices from Joomla community for upgrading Joomla site... And then..<strong>&nbsp;It sucks.</strong></p><p><strong>There is no native way to upgrade multilingual support in Joomla.</strong>&nbsp;I spent 2 days figuring out, how the hell get that site back working with multilingual, and no progress.&nbsp;</p><p>Joomla is using some really fishing plugin for i18n, called joomfish... Name says everything -<strong>&nbsp;it's some fishy plugin...</strong></p><p>So&nbsp;<strong>screw you Joomla</strong>&nbsp;- I set up a new Drupal site, added a Joomla migration module, to import all Joomla articles to site, recreated menus, re-themed theme in less than 6 hours in Drupal.</p><p>Some might say - that's because I'm&nbsp;<strong>working with Drupal on my everyday basis</strong>, that's right. But for me it seems strange - it's easier to perform Joomla to Drupal convert, than perform Joomla - Joomla upgrade.</p></blockquote><p>I have written a longer article of<a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/drupal-developer/performing-joomla-15-conv…; how to perform Joomla to Drupal</a>, where (if you are interested) you will find more about technical stuff.</p><h2>About TBSC Consulting</h2><p>TBSC Consulting is a boutique management consulting firm located in Tbilisi, Georgia.</p><p>TBSC helps organizations make better strategic and tactical decisions by performing detailed analysis needed to support those decisions. Hence our tagline: Better Decisions Through Analysis. The steady increase in the scope of our services, clients and projects demonstrates the high value of our advisory services to local and international clients.</p><p>Over the past ten years, TBSC has helped nearly 100 organizations to make better decisions including the largest Georgian banks, highly diversified Georgian companies, foreign investors, international financial institutions, the Government of Georgia, diplomatic missions, donors and non-governmental organizations. TBSC’s President and Founder has advised senior managers, boards of directors and supervisory boards in North America and Western, Central and Southeast Europe for more than 25 years. Local staff represent the cream of graduates from Georgian and Western universities and have significant experience of working with Georgian and international clients. Through a strategic alliance with Larive Group, TBSC successfully bridges the link between local and international companies in Western and Eastern Europe and Asia. This way, TBSC not only assists western companies in expanding into the Georgian market, but also helps Georgian companies expand into other markets, find foreign partners and benefit from modern technologies and know-how transfer.</p><p>Learn more about TBSC Consulting: <a href="http://www.tbsc.ge">www.tbsc.ge</a></p&gt;