It's been really long overdue. How overdue you ask? Well, kendrickcoleman.com was originally built on Joomla 1.5. Joomla 1.6 was released in January of 2011 and the effort to upgrade would have been just as tough as this move to Joomla 3.2. Joomla 1.5 went completely EOL in April of 2013 so no new patches or security releases were going to come out.
So why make the jump? Joomla 3 has really good responsive templates based on Twitter Bootstrap so it works well on any device. In addition, Joomla 1.5 had some major security flaws but I was lucky enough to never get attacked. It was also a good time to give the website a fresh new look that conforms to some modern design.
The toughest piece of this migration is that there is no "in-place" upgrade. I have tried to upgrade my site a few times over the past year but it came with sub-par results. All the free tools just never seemed to work good enough. So I finally opened up my wallet and paid for the MigrateMe plug-in. It wasn't cheap, but in the end it was worth every penny. It kept literally everything in tact. Articles, sections, banners, components, stats, etc all migrated over. There were a few anticipated hiccups but it went fairly well.
This new template is called Zenith and comes from Themexpert. I probably spent a good chunk of my time customizing and tailoring the CSS to look the way I want. The fact that I had previous experiance working with twitter bootstrap on JumpSquares made it real easy to know how the placement of content works on this template. I also really liked the menu bar. I'm a sucker for eye candy. I like how I can create modules that expand based on the menu item that is chosen (only for desktop users), just hover some of the menu items.
Many of the articles will now show a "modified date" of 4/12 because I went through the top 50% of all my articles and added tags to each one. This will help show similar articles at the very bottom below the disqus module. Any btw, I'm grateful disqus exists. It makes life super easy to transfer comments for articles.
The final hurdle was getting Phoca Download to start working again after making the transfer to the production site. Come to find out, I screwed up 2 index.html files during the transfer and all the files needed to be set to "Public" access. So all downloads should be working across the site.
For any potential advertisers out there, you can purchase multiple types of banner ads (some that are even hidden at this moment) at BuySellAds and expect ~35-40k page views per month.
If you come across anything that isn't working, whether it's a link, download, code, etc, please let me know and I'll get it fixed.
I hope you like the new layout because it's about time it happened.