Joomla plugin upgrade/migration from 1.0 to 1.5

Recently I had to migrate some custom Joomla plugins on an old 1.0.x Joomla website to a 1.5 based Joomla website. I am noting down how I did this since there doesn’t seem to be a similar document out there.

Installation XML

You can keep the name (plugin.xml).
Make sure to change the first two lines and the last line:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<mosinstall version="1.0" type="mambots" group="content">
...
</mosinstall>

to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<install version="1.5" type="plugin" group="content">
...
</install>

Add an author e-mail as well:

<authorEmail>aaa@aaa.com</authorEmail>

Change the attribute from “mambot” to “plugin”:

<filename mambot="etplugin">etplugin.php</filename>

 

<filename plugin="etplugin">etplugin.php</filename>

Plugin code

Keep the same file name : plugin.php

Change the first line from:

defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Direct Access to this location is not allowed.' );

to

defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Direct Access to this location is not allowed.' );

Change registerFunction() to registerEvent():

$_MAMBOTS->registerFunction( 'onPrepareContent', 'botFnCall' );

to

$mainframe->registerEvent( 'onPrepareContent', 'plgFnCall' );

Make sure to change references for variables such as $mosConfig_live_site, $mosConfig_absolute_path, $database, etc as specified here.

The function call construct no longer has four arguments:

function botFnCall( $published, &$row, $mask=0, $page=0  ) {

Instead it has three:

function plgFnCall( &$row, &$params, $page=0 ) {

Add a performance check for good measure:

	// simple performance check to determine whether bot should process further
	if ( JString::strpos( $row->text, 'pluginTag' ) === false ) {
		return true;
	}

Change the published check:

	if (!$published) {
		return true;
	}

to:

	if ( !$params->get( 'enabled', 1 ) ) {
		return true;
	}

Change any references to the “/mambots/” directory to “/plugins/” (if you’re including custom CSS, JS, and the like.)