12 years 10 months ago
Hi Jelmar,
First of all, sorry to hear this happened to you on such a large scale.
I have dealt with instances of the pharma virus in the past (originaly targeted at wordpress sites but moved on to joomla).
It was similar to your situation where encoded htacess files were scatered around the site (actually htaccess.php files). On browsing to them I found a control panel more advanced than the hosting companys which gave me access to every file on the shared server.
So first of all this may not be down to an insecurity in your sites, rather another site hosted on the same server.
Regarding the use of suPHP, when configured correctly it is regarded as more secure than a standard handler, but when not set up correctly can be very insecure. That is the extent of my knowledge on that point. Joomla's ftp layer can help but unless you have a vps and ssh access it is far from ideal and not even ideal if you have that.
But moving on...
Migrating from 1.5 to 2.5 or just from one site to another, I have tried many things. So he is the solution I have found to be the cleanest-ish solution.
First, I have not tried spupgrade as there were many free solutions that people recommended.
First I tried j2xml exporter which seemed to cleanly take content from a 1.5 site to 1.7, but I tried this early on when it was just out and it wasn't quite enough.
A lot of people recommended Jupgrade which also had issues (the latest version seems to have the most) but I stuck with this for the first part of the process for a couple of reasons.
1. It keeps article and menu ids so internal links still work.
2. You can run it without affecting your current website.
The downside is that it uses the same database with the same prefix and copies over all your 1.5 extensions and can result in a mess of a database and file system (lots of old extensions hanging around in the background).
So my general upgrade process has come to be this:
1. Take a backup of the current site and make a local install.
2. Run jupgrade.
NB. The current version seems to have trouble downloading and installing a copy of 2.5, so I pre-install a copy and add the database prefix in the parameters and tell it to skip downloading and checks to get the old info into the new db.
3. Now I have a 2.5 site with original content plus a load of old rubbish. So I make a fresh install of joomla 2.5 with the same prefix as my migrated website.
4. I then go to the database of the jupgraded site and export the tables for content, categories, users and menus and then wipe those tables in the fresh install and import the new ones.
I then have a fresh site with my old content.
Next is to check which old plugins/components/modules the site was running and which ones I want to keep (if they have been upgraded) and install them.
Template and framework too.
The rest is really bits that are different between versions. Ie. metadata and page titles were added to articles and now they are added to menu otems which can be a long slog so sort out.
Also I check the urls of my old site and scan my new one using xenu (
home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and create 301 redirects in the htaccess file to make sure there are no 404's when people try to find a page from the old website.
That basically gives me the new site.
With your template css, it may well be that the css for the 2.5 version is different to the 1.5 version anyway and you would still have to tweek it to get everything looking as it was.
But you know that J templates have a custom css file system and now is the time to start using it!
I would install the template as is, and then check the bits that don't look right then go through your old css and add this to a custom file to keep it all in one place.
I'd like to say it's easy but unfortunately there are many trip ups along the way. My main suggestion is to try and get the cleanest 2.5 site you can from the whole upgrade path.
These are only my thoughts on the matter and maybe I have been doing it all wrong and someone can shed some light on it, but this is the way I have found to be best for me and trouble free in the long run.
Which ever path you choose, let us know how you get on. Maybe we can help, or maybe you can help us and others!
Regards,
Rob