One of my websites is build on the CMS Joomla. These days I’m much more comfortable with Wordpress.
Today I will guide you, how to easy migrate from Joomla/Mambo to Wordpress.

Migrating Articles from Mambo/Joomla to Wordpress
With this wizzard from Rodney Blevins you can migrate Mambo/Joomla articles and links very easy to Wordpress.
Unfortunately migrating the links didn’t really work for my Wordpress 2.7.

Notice that for this wizzard, both installations of Mambo/Joomla and Wordpress need to be on the same webserver installed.

1. Download the wizzard from the above link.
2. Create a new folder “export” in the root of your Wordpress installation.
3. Edit the config.php file, with the database name, username, password of Mambo/Joomla and Wordpress database settings.
4. Incase you have Joomla installed, or you changed the database prefix; you’ll have to edit the var: “$dbprefix” to your prefix. For example: “mos_” to: “jos_”.
5. Incase the database prefix for the Wordpress DB is different then “wp_”; open up the index.php file, and search / replace all: “wp_” and change it manually to your prefix. For example: “wp_” to “lee_”.
6. Now save and upload the index.php and config.php files to the export folder
7. Surf to http://your-wp-installation/export and follow the steps to import your articles or links into Wordpress.

Removing Mambo/Joomla tags from Wordpress posts
Now when your done, it could be that your Wordpress post message contain Joomla tags in the post.
Tags like: “{mosimage}” or plugin based tags like: “{rokaccess}”.
You can easily remove these tags from all your post with some database queries.
Open phpMyAdmin and within your Wordpress database, press the SQL tab.

To see how many post I have with Mambo/Joomla tags, I used this query:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE "%{%"

I noticed by the retrieved list, that some of my posts contain the {mosimage} tag.
To remove (replace to empty string) these tags and update my posts, I used the following query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, "{mosimage}", "");

Just another check, to see if 0 posts return, if I search in my Wordpress database for the {mosimage} tag:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE "{mosimage}"

Migrating users
The next important thing to migrate, will be the user database.
Let’s compare both XML exports from phpMyAdmin, to see the table structures:

Joomla Export:

<jos_users>
    <id>64</id>
    <name>Lee</name>
    <username>Lee</username>
    <email>my@email.nl</email>
    <password>###</password>
    <usertype>Super Administrator</usertype>
    <block>0</block>
    <sendEmail>0</sendEmail>
    <gid>25</gid>
    <registerDate>2007-07-25 21:57:51</registerDate>
    <lastvisitDate>2009-05-01 18:01:52</lastvisitDate>
    <activation></activation>
    <params>editor=none</params>
</jos_users>

Same Export in Wordpress would be:

<wp_users>
    <user_login>Lee</user_login>
    <user_pass></user_pass>
    <user_nicename>Lee</user_nicename>
    <user_email>my@email.nl</user_email>
    <user_url>http://www.ladysign.nl</user_url>
    <user_registered>2007-07-25 21:57:51<</user_registered>
    <user_activation_key></user_activation_key>
    <user_status>0</user_status>
    <display_name>Lee</display_name>
</wp_users>

Be replacing the table names in the export, or writing a nice script which creates a INSERT INTO query,
you can prefill the Wordpress database with the users from the Mambo/Joomla user table.
However, there will be one problem.

Password encryption
And that problem is setting over the passwords.
Joomla! 1.5 uses MD5 to hash the passwords. When the passwords are created, they are hashed with a 32 character salt that is appended to the end of the password string.
The password is stored as {TOTAL HASH}:{ORIGINAL SALT}.
That’s diffrent then the MD5 encryption of Wordpress.
For now I’ll solve this, by removing all the Wordpress passwords, and let the user recreate a new one via ‘lost password’.
This is ofcourse not a nice solution. Does anyone has an idea?

Javascript frameworks are for easing development and dynamic web apps.
These toolkits enables you to deal with Ajax calls in an easy and fun way and it’s also cross browser safe.

It can be handy, if you know already something about JSON:
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write and it is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition – December 1999.
JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

It’s a personal choice which of the Javascript Frameworks you should choose.
Basically they are all more or less providing you the same functionality, and they all
contain excellent documentation and API’s with examples.
I will show you the 6 most popular frameworks, and tell you the current version,
download link and which websites these frameworks use. Also the size of the .js file,
which is an important detail.

* = compressed gzipped / uncompressed

There are 4 main checks for diagnosing remote database connection problems:

• tnsnames.ora
• Oracle class path
• ping
• tnsping

tnsnames.ora

First check if the tnsnames.ora file has the correct database information/credentials.
The tnsnames.ora file can be found in: \ORACLE\ora92\network\ADMIN
These credentials should look like:

MYDATABSENAME =
	(DESCRIPTION=
		(ADDRESS_LIST=
			(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=ladysign)(PORT=<port 1111>))
		)
		(CONNECT_DATA=
			(SERVICE_NAME=myServiceName)
		)
	)

Oracle Class path

Make sure oracle is in your class path.
Press Windows Key + Break key; Advanced Tab > Environment Variables
Make sure there is a ORACLE_HOME system variable. For example:
ORACLE_HOME = C:\\ORACLE\ora92

Ping

The ping utility is used to test the connectivity to a remote machine. ping will indicate whether a remote server is accessible and responding. If the ping command indicates that a machine cannot be accessed, the other connectivity tests will also fail.
U can use the ping command via the (DOS) command line; ping . For example:

C:\>ping ladysign
Pinging ladysign [198.64.245.67] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 198.64.245.67: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=254
Reply from 198.64.245.67: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=254
Reply from 198.64.245.67: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=254
Reply from 198.64.245.67: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=254

TNSPing

When the connectivity to the host is confirmed with the ping command, the next connection to check is the listener.
You can do this with the tnsping utility, which determines wheter or not an Oracle service can be succesfully reached.
However, tnssping will only report if the listener process is up and provides no indication of the state of the database:
For example:

C:\>tnsping MYDATABASENAME

TNS Ping Utility for 32-bit Windows: Version 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on 06-APR-2009 11:02:32

Copyright (c) 1997 Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Used parameter files:
C:\ORACLE\ora92\network\admin\sqlnet.ora

Used TNSNAMES adapter to resolve the alias
Attempting to contact (DESCRIPTION= (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=ladysign)(PORT=1111))) (CONNECT_DATA= (SERVICE_NAME=myDatabaseService)))
OK (80 msec)
OK (10 msec)
OK (10 msec)
OK (0 msec)
OK (10 msec)

Ever wanted to query a resultset and received a whole bunch of results with empty values?
Just query on select no empty values.
The query can look like this:

SELECT * FROM MY_TABLE WHERE CD_VAL = 'something' AND CD_VAL IS NOT NULL;

Say you want to query all the fields after a specific date.
You’ll just write a sql with a value > then the filled in date.
But how do you specify a date? You need the to_Date function for doing this.

TIMESTAMP >= to_Date('20081203','yyyymmdd')