Truthout.org Finds Refuge in Joomla!

Truthout.org was one among those sites by Drupal which was outdated and scavenged by malicious attacks, and effortlessly hacked every week. Tired of being a pushover Truthout.org turned towards Joomla! Developers to transform the site’s platform to a more flexible and stable premise. 

 

Obstacles Wiped Out

From the initial stages the site had numerous problems and each problem was a hurdle to the Joomla! developers. The basic problem was the outdated and ill-maintained condition of the site which was making the site an easy target to bots and other aggressive functions to hack it in a regular basis. And securing the site from attacks from all directions was a task which looked like mountain to the Joomla developers. Once this was tackled the next hurdle rose, which was migrating such a huge database of large scale Drupal to Joomla! and this was the first of its kind. With combined content of 200,000+ articles alone, each with 15-20 unique fields in Drupal, and tens of thousands of users, this was definitely a unique challenge.

The process of migration was also done efficiently by the talented Joomla developer and the next task was to clone the site already exiting template from Drupal to a Joomla! template. And finally the high-profile site was secured from external threats. 

 

Procedural Structure of Joomla! Developer’s Job

Security

Delaying even minutes proved to be a security hazard for the site as it was getting hacked on a regular basis. Thus the preference for holding the old site was given priority even while the new site was being developed. Once the old site was kept in a secure place, the new site had to be secured accordingly and for this the Joomla! developers sought the help of the most reliable security providers SecureLive. 

 

Content Construction

The content which was already present in the Drupal site had to be cloned to the new Joomla! site. The content which was present in the old site had to be mapped in a order so that it could be imported and presented in Joomla!. To tackle this barrier of the need for content extension Joomla! developers adopted the K2 CCK. K2 was built as a complete replacement of the default article system in Joomla!.  K2 CCK can be installed like any Joomla! extension which will import articles from the default Joomla! article system and instantly get a host of new features for the existing content. There were many options which were considered by the Joomla! developers to manage the content but finally K2 was opted for as it was technically compatible with the specific format with which Drupal stores data. The work did not end with the process of importing the content, Joomla! developers had to go further and according to the client’s specification building of many custom K2 features to assist in both content editing, and presentation were done. 

 

User Management

While importing content Joomla! developers experience this difficulty of maintaining consistency in the association of user and content. In Joomla! (and K2) a single user can be assigned to a single article. With a news agency like Truthout.org it became necessary for the Joomla! developers to collaborate a single article with multiple users as there were numerous articles and series associated with a number of authors. As this problem was tackled recently by the Joomla team while working in a project for the United Nations, it was simple for them to handle it this time around. 

 

Overall Site Design

The final design of the site was the final frontier for this project as the new site had to be adopted entirely from the already existed Drupal template. To facilitate the requirements of the site layout, and the unique positioning of different modules and new module positions, Joomla! developers started with the T3 framework from Joomlart to build a flexible template that can easily be expanded as needed.

 

DCKAP can build robust and reliable applications on the Joomla framework with experienced Joomla developers, Joomla programmer, Joomla programmers, Joomla developer, Joomla development services, Joomla integration, Joomla programmers, migration, maintenance and support.

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