Observations and suggestions for migrating existing sites

Since I'm in the process of migrating an existing site to Flexicontent, I thought I'd share my observations and suggestions about the process. I'll add more to the thread if I come across anything else.

The ability to migrate existing Joomla content of course is extremely helpful. But a couple of changes could help save a lot of time I think.

Uncategorized Content. The migration doesn't include uncategorized content. Perhaps the solution would be to have Flexicontent automatically create a new "uncategorized" category and bring this content into it.

Menu Items and duplicate article creation on migration. The bigger the site, the longer it takes to transfer menus from core article types to flexi items. Secondary issue exists on non-SEF sites as all urls are now different because of the item and article id changes.

EDIT: Actually, even the urls on sites with SEF enabled will also change whenever the "alias" has been modified. Obviously, this means incoming links to the old URL's will be broken unless the alias's are all updated or 301s are added.

Is there a way to allow menus to stay as standard Joomla menu types? Are duplicating articles and creating new itemIDs/articleIds necessary for the migration? Except for possible performance issues, the front-end redirect seems to work ok... You mentioned about hits being duplicated (Emmanuel), but I personally never use hits and I'm probably not the only one

Article Binding. After migration, articles weren't automatically binded for me. Not a big issue, but just FYI it did take a little head scratching and clicking around the control panel to get the message offering to bind the articles. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but if you can't (or don't want to) automate this, it might be helpful to others to provide a tip after the migration about what to do.

Automatic Binding would be helpful
did a lot of head scratching myself
when I first installed this component There is a lot of potential in Flexicontent. I finaly coneverted my site to flexicontent and I love it. There are a few things I have still to figure out but I will get there.
Keep up the good work I can't wait for the stable release.

While it would obviously be nice if menu items and bindings were automated (bindings are, you just have to fish around a bit), I think it's a relatively small amount of work (unless perhaps you had 100's of menu items). Like I said, at a minimum some instructions about bindings and how to deal with existing menu-items would be a help I think.

Native modules like Latest News still work (and even show flexi-fields), but the urls change and aren't SEF. This means duplicate content is created.

Some of this will be solved I think with the new all-purpose module. Looking forward to it and am excited to see what it will do.

Interestingly, the Section Ex component sort of works, but the urls it creates aren't translated to com_flexicontent like the native modules. That means when you click on an article, the extra fields and item template won't display.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. I chose the wrong section in Section Ex (a com_content one I hadn't deleted yet). Well, the urls do translate and the custom fields display although same problem with duplicate content as the latest news module. But it's pretty much useless at least out of the box since you can only choose "flexicontent" as your section (which is ostensibly everything on your website). Proble is SectionEx only asks for a section, but Flexicontent's toplevel categories are all "Categories" to joomla.

In some ways this is good news in general because many extensions allow you to choose categories, in which Flexi categories would be available and (theoretically) work.

For those with articles saved as text files, you can modify "Bulk Import" to do the job. I imported 111,000 articles. It took 7 hours to complete, and I had to pause the importing.

Wow. That's a lot of articles!