Over at http://worldnewstrust.com we have a ton of content. We also have a strong desire to migrate to Joomla 1.5. To do so opened up a can of worms, because migrating all that content, not to mention all the other base Joomla settings presented a very worrisome obstacle. We lost a lot of content when we migrated WNT from Xoops to Joomla and we did not want to go through that again.

Now, I first tried com_migrator, a great effort by one of the finest gentlemen programming for Joomla, "pasamio", Sam Moffatt. I first had problems with this when it would not handle my zipped database migration dump. Sam got back to me promptly, was impeccably helpful and courteous to a fault. Oh, that all software developers were like Sam(Present company excepted, of course, Merav.  ) ! Sadly, While the database was migrated, there still seems some work needs to be done with the way it all goes down with com_migrator. The new 1.5 testbed site did not show a damn thing on the front page and returned no error messages, save "component not found". Which component? What component? Huh? Most frustrating.

I went to the Joomla migration forum and did some reading. I was at least heartened to note that I was hardly the only person to have this issue. In that thread, one person stated that he had easy success with the mtwMigrator component. This component installs on 1.5, you configure it for access to your old database and it drags the data across, reformatting on the fly.

I am happy to say it worked without a burp, fart or bobble. Of course, on the stock template and with some other things, we do have some display problems. These are, in comparison to the data migration, trivial.

For those who are going to making this migration and plan on using the same server they are already using, I highly recommend playing with mtwMigrator on your sandbox system. For now. That's what we will be doing, until Merav gets News Portal for 1.5 finished(it is the lynchpin of our site. Everything our site is, is about News Portal. And hopefully Magazine, in the future).

That's what we will be doing, because we want to get this one right. Happily, mtwMigrator makes one step of the process just that little bit easier.