Last week I challenged my first migration from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7. Jupgrade is a wonderful tool, it worked pretty well but leaved the categories tree in an unuseable state and made a big mess in the article’s ACL. The symptoms of the two problems are:
  1. some categories (non only in articles but also in weblinks and contacts) are not shown in the articles category drop-down list, a category tree rebuild from the control panel doesn’t solve the problem
  2. users of levels different than superadminstrator cannot edit and save articles created from other users, apparently the ACL should allow this because they are set to “inherit” and the action should be allowed by the upstream ACL.
At first I managed to solve the tree problem with some SQL but this was not enough to solve the second issue: most articles (hundreds of them) still had wrong ACL set preventing administrator level users to edit or save other’s articles. Opening and saving each single article when logged in as superadministrator solved the issue, but doing this boring procedure with hundreds of articles and having many other sites to migrate the most obvious solution was to write a small component to fix those issues. The component performs two tasks:
  1. rebuild the category tree, assigning correct depth and parent
  2. reset all category and article’s ACLs to default (inherited)
No warranty and no assistance are available but if it helped you to solve a problem and to save time and money, a donation of any amount would be appreciated. Download the component com_fixperm.