I recently decided to move my Joomla installation from v1.5 to 2.5, a not-inconsiderable task considering that there is no direct upgrade from 1.5. It took some time to get the Jupgrade free tool working but finally I got all my content moved across. Of course, 1.5 templates are not compatible and so started a tour of joomla template sites around the web.
And that is where it all fell apart. 2 templates I had downloaded from a particular site included some nasty malware – suddenly my site was serving up redirection links and was subsequently marked as ‘bad’ through Google’s search engine ( and a few others ). I had backups of both my web data and the databases. However, after spending many hours trying to get rid of malware, I decided to just start from scratch with fresh Joomla and WordPress installs. And an updated php installation. And file checksumming. And a web app firewall.
I realised that even though I had backups, they weren’t to the level required to solve this issue properly. Fixed now! My Google WebMaster review has gone in again ( 2nd time in the last few days ) so here’s hoping the site stays clean for the foreseeable future.
Still looking for a nice template though – if anyone has any ideas …