“fyi now that the main joomla.org site is on j4. my next target is the magazine”. That was the first sentence of the very first direct message I ever got from George Wilson. Followed by a link, and “i've got a backup here that i'll be working on over the next few weeks. don't need anything from you either (for now). but just to make you aware so that when the moment comes it isn't a total surprise”.

Come on, of course this was a total surprise! But a good one. And George Wilson no less. The guy whose Joomla Track Record is as long as my - well, as long as anyone’s arm, really (if you don’t know George, check out his profile in the Joomla Volunteers Portal, and make sure to click on the Honour Roll tab as well).

I told him this was exciting news and asked him to keep me posted and ping me if he needed anything from me. Which he did, over the weeks that followed.

The next major moment came with this message: “would be good for you and anyone else from the magazine team to start looking at the site (the sandbox link from earlier). i've spent some time doing quite a bit of minor changes and stuff to get the easyblog stuff looking a little bit more like the rest of the core sites. still some tweaks to go of course. but would be good if there's anything glaring from you guys' perspectives as you probably use it more day to day.”

I scheduled a date with Louise Hawkins (marketing team leader at the time, now Outreach Department coordinator) to go over all the design changes. We made a list of things we’d like to see differently. A numbered list, with seven (yes, only seven!) items that I then gave to George. That was well received: “ok ok ok. this is way better than i was expecting.”

And then he responded to every item on the list, with answers varying from “probably the easiest thing” and “that one is easy” to “I was really hoping you wouldn't ask this one 🙂”. 

Everything got fixed one way or another, we found new things to fix, had pleasant conversations about this, and then, on August 2, this message came:

“ok the website's updated.
girlfriend unexpectedly went out for drinks tonight so found myself with time”

I did a happy dance, told him to thank the girlfriend for me, did another happy dance, and in the following days we both went through the whole site, found a few small issues that were easy to solve, and the migration was done.

Painless, smooth, friendly, pleasant. 

These are the words that come to mind when I think back on this migration process. On behalf of the whole Joomla Community Magazine Team I want to say: Thank you George, for making this happen!