Updating MojoMotor to ExpressionEngine 5

At Antistatic, we not only support the websites we've designed and built over the years, but we also offer support and maintenance services for those who are looking for a change or maybe have been abandoned by their previous web development partner. This leads us to a support project we recently completed that goes something like this...

Years ago in a galaxy that seems far, far away, the original creators of ExpressionEngine (EllisLab) made a very simplified content management system called MojoMotor. MojoMotor provided limited content management capabilities for simple sites. The product was launched in 2010 but lacked the marketing and support of its flagship product ExpressionEngine (EE). Very quickly, MojoMotor fell by the wayside and was officially retired in 2015.

As with any content management system (CMS), there are updates and security patches that need to be addressed to keep your site in tip top shape. The makers of ExpressionEngine thankfully provided a way to update from MojoMotor to ExpressionEngine 2 which allowed MojoMotor sites to live on with EE support and updates.

This particular website, built 10 years ago on MojoMotor, was happily and securly chugging along until one day, the hosting company updated their server's PHP version from 5.1 to 7.3. This surprise change completely broke the company's website leaving them high and dry. The company who built the MojoMotor website was long out of business and they didn't know where to turn or what to do. After some strategic googling for web development shops with expertise in ExpressionEngine and content managed websites, they found our company, Antistatic.

We assessed the situation and offered them a few options to consider and ultimately the client decided to salvage the MojoMotor website and bring it up to date on the latest version of ExpressionEngine 5. To accomplish this, we created a duplicate of their MojoMotor site in our staging envroinment. Here we were able to get the MojoMotor site up and running, do some required clean up, and prepare for the upgrade to ExpressionEngine. The process of updating from MojoMotor to EE isn't as painless as one would like. We initiated the process several times only to find it fail for one reason or another. Each time we restored from backups and attacked the reasons for the upgrade failures. Finally, the sun broke through the clouds and the site successfully migrated from MojoMotor to ExpressionEngine 2. This wasn't the end though, we quickly worked through our protocol of updating ExpressionEngine 2 sites to ExpressionEngine 3 and from ExpressionEngine 3 to the latest version of ExpressionEngine 5. When the dust settled, the process took approximately 20 hours to bring the site back online and save this client's website investment.

Maybe your website is powered by MojoMotor or maybe you are still running an old version of ExpressionEngine like EE1 (we recently updated one of these as well), whatever your situation, we can help. Drop us a line or pick up the phone and give us a call.