JomSocial Has A New Home!
JomSocial site has been running on Joomla 2.5 since 2013. I dreaded migrating it to Joomla 3. It’s a complex site. We use a heavily customized Kunena forum and a really old version of DigiStore, a product that we no longer develop ourselves.
Over the last few months, things started to fall apart.
It started with our directory. Powered by Mosets Tree, the directory was so old that it became vulnerable to all sorts of malicious scripts. We’ve had to keep patching it.
Another problem was that we couldn’t use the latest version of our own JomSocial; it only works on Joomla 3. Our hacked version of Kunena was becoming heavy and hard to manage. And while DigiStore still worked great, we stopped developing it a few years ago and we’ve seen a worrying number of negative reviews since Foobla took it over.
Finally, we knew that the design we were so proud of in 2013 was looking outdated and stale. Three years in Internet days is like 100 real years.
It was becoming obvious that this migration had to happen, no matter how painful and expensive it was going to be.
Three Hard Months Later…
It took us three months, lots of late nights and more coffee than anyone should drink but JomSocial’s new site has a brand new design. And it’s great!
We redesigned every single page. We returned the forum to its original code—no hacking. The add-on directory is much nicer and easier to use. It’s still powered by Mosets Tree, but the design is much better than the default.
As expected, the new DigiStore version developed by Foobla was quite buggy but we fixed those bugs one-by-one. (We’re still working out some last issues, such as upgrading from Standard to Pro.)
The pricing page is a lot clearer now and it’s easy to understand what is in each version.
And JomSocial is the latest version. Yay! Look out for the new features Sinisa described on our blog.
Overall, it was a huge undertaking but it was well worth it. The new site looks great. Our community members love the new appearance, and we love logging into our site every day and seeing the modern and slick design.