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Its time to take an old Joomla (1.0) site and convert it into a Drupal site. I'll be using the module - Joomla to Drupal.

The site contains just over 600 entries with search engine friendly urls (/section/category/title-to-url.html) and has a sobi directory but only 3 categories and less than 30 entries.

The Joomla to Drupal Module only works on databases either on the same server or accepting remote connections. Most mysql servers do not allow remote connections (they shouldn't).

In this case the Joomla database is not located on the same server but I will attempt a work around by creating a copy of the database and install a copy locally

After installing a copy of the database on the same server as the target Drupal site I then create a subdomain (like temp.example.com) of the Joomla site and install Drupal with some of the basic must have modules.

Next I install the Joomla to Drupal Module (which development has been discontinued on)

Settings admin >> settings >> joomla

Joomla database host name: Since I imported a dump from the remote host I set to localhost followed by the temp Joomla database name I created along with username and password for it. The URL of the current Joomla site which must be used to correct url and image paths but I am just guessing on that. Setting of which type I want the content placed into for static and normal joomla content types.

Next onto admin >> content >> joomla_import

• Processed 2 users (1 new, 0 updated, 1 errors)
• Processed 6 sections (0 new, 0 updated, 0 errors)
• Processed 20 categories (0 new, 0 updated, 0 errors)
• Processed 606 content items (606 new, 0 updated, 0 errors)

Importation seemed to go well the 1 error for users was because the username for Joomla was already in use on the target Drupal site.

Now for the real trouble I knew would be coming. The search engine friendly URLs from Joomla need to be recreated. The sobi directory I knew wouldn't carry over and I will have to create a custom content type to carry those over. But the seo friendly URLs could take a lot of opening and editing each entry to get the urls to match up.

Until then they are all node/(nodeid)  attempts at using auto generating url aliases just aren't quite matching up. And unlike horseshoes close doesn't count. Since they are quite close I'm hoping to come up with a quick sql based fix but most likely it will need a manual update for each entry.

But I still think a switch from Joomla to Drupal will pay off in the long run being far easier to control and add customizations as needed.