Back in 2015, the Bharat Rakshak website underwent a significant upgrade. This involved moving several static sections to Joomla’s content management system and making the front page mobile-ready. Despite the considerable effort, the updates for the Army and Navy sections lagged, while the Air Force section continued to receive regular updates. We managed to turn a patchwork of different websites into something standardised. Yet at the end of the effort, we ended up with, four Joomla installations, one WordPress, four Gallery 2.0 , one custom PHP front page, and a whole set of database pages in the IAF section. This created a huge maintenance overhead when it came to upkeep.
Nine years later, it became evident that another revamp was necessary. This time, the primary drivers were the obsolescence of the software supporting various applications and the inability to patch to the latest PHP and MySQL variants. The legacy installation of the gallery software, which included four installations for the Air Force, Army, and Navy, was a significant hurdle. Gallery 2.0 had been phased out over ten years ago, and even Gallery 3.0 was outdated and no longer in development. With over 11,000 images across these gallery installations, this legacy feature prevented us from upgrading our PHP and MySQL versions.
WordPress emerged as the ideal choice in the quest for a more versatile and efficient content management system. While Joomla was the preferred CMS in 2015, WordPress has since evolved into a robust, feature-rich platform. Its ability to support a wide range of plugins and the powerful WordPress Multi-site feature, which allows for easy updates and patching across multiple subsites, made it an attractive option.
The transformation involved merging four Joomla sites into WordPress. Unfortunately, we had to retire the old gallery installations. We chose the Piwigo PHP-based gallery system as a replacement. Although Piwigo is fast and lightweight, it doesn’t offer the same versatility as Gallery 2.0. This migration lost some functionality, such as clean-looking URLs and templates, but we decided to prioritize ease of maintenance and updates.
The transition is not yet complete. We’re still evaluating whether future updates will be made directly to the Piwigo gallery or if we’ll migrate everything to WordPress. I prefer standalone WordPress installations, which might mean phasing out Piwigo eventually. But considering the sheer number of images and galleries in there, it will likely not happen for along time.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance the Bharat Rakshak website and invite the community to join us in this exciting journey.
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