I know I've been saying it for weeks but I got tired of not being able to update the site so this morning at 3am I backed up all of my databases, renamed the old database for this site, renamed my new test database, tarred up the test web directory, renamed the web directory for this site, renamed the test directory to take the place of the old web directory, edited all the files that pointed to the test database and here we are. So far it seems to be working.
To refresh your memory I had the strangest things happening. I had whole menu's that would pop up an error 404 - article not found and that was even when the menu didn't point to an article. I had the Superblogger plugin throwing fits, my cookbook was a pain in the arse, I had no reviews module that worked.
What I did was installed Joomla from scratch on a brand new database, installed only the components, modules and plugins that I wanted (database tables went from 167 to 93!), created a theme for Superblogger, saved individual tables out of the old database and imported them one by one into the new one, recreated categories and sections and doublechecked each menu to see where things were broken.
What's new:
- It works. That's right before it didn't.
- All menu items actually point to something and that something actually shows up
- Massive bugs in the old database have been cleaned out.
- Recipebook fashioned out of a cloned Sobi II Business Index replaces poorly designed purposebuilt recipebook
- Reviews component (not quite done though!) fashioned out of a cloned Sobi II Business Index gives me reviews that I've not had in 2 years.
- Superblogger plugin which brings with it article ratings, comments handled by Disqus (you'll like it...), socialbookmarking (facebook, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious etc..), browser bookmarking of articles, trackback URLs and RSS feeds for categories and comments.
- Service map integrator that notifies the search engines when there's updates so they remain more up to date.
- Search works for everything including reviews, recipes, links, articles and photos.
- Many other things that only effect me as an Admin.
What this will do is allow me to keep my recipes online, allow me to go back to putting up reviews, give me more power as a blogger, allow you the reader to spread the word easier with the social bookmarking, allow trackbacks, more thorough RSS feeds for everything including recipes, comments and categoies and keep more up to date in the search engines.
What's not done:
I started working on the fields and themes for the Reviews modules but I'm not quite done yet. I'm also not done with modifying the templates for the blogger plugin.
Overall it will be a much nicer and more stable site to browse.