Dahlfred.com
Dahlfred.com is Karl & Sun Dahlfred’s Missionaries to Thailand, a Joomla blog(s) for their Christian missionary activities in North Thailand. By the sheer grace of God, I met Dr. Karl Dahlfred, at church one fine Sunday morning, where I’ve been living in Southeast Asia, here in Chiang Mai, North Thailand, late 2025, myself a saved Christian, since ~2021, my just having wandered into church that day. Karl’s a VERY highly-educated American missionary, and he speaks, reads, preaches, and tyoes fluent Thai! His website was running on Joomla3, while since then, not only had Joomla developed by three MAJOR semantic versions, but PHP as well, had since re-versioned from 7->8. “Love it or leave it,” much of the web’s code of the 2020’s, still runs on PHP!! Thus I needed to get Karl’s site from Joomla3 to Current J6, and rescue the existing GPL templates and modules out of PHP7-land, into modern php8-fpm. And although I knew I could do all the recode myself, having worked with PHP years prior, I knew the work was huge, just considering all the changes that would have been needed, just to get from a Joomla 3 to 4! Nothing on LinkedIn or elsewhere was awarding me paying work at the time, while here was a WEBSITE for my bread-n-butter!! Working this site really made my Christmas Merry too, since I’d met Karl just a month or two earlier. Because of the sheer complexity of J3–>6, my GitHub’s CoPilot proved crucial in maintaining backwards-compatibility, and redeploying EIGHT HUNDRED+ URLs back to production. I’m admittedly very proud of this work, because what could have been a 2-3mo. estimate, took 2-3wks thanks to LLMs, and like a lot of stuff I admittedly prefer to work on, I know that what Karl blogs about leaves the world the web is for reaching, all the better for it. In that same spirit, and with the help of AI for covering the enormity of changes needed, I was also able to make several opensource contribs to Joomla, copyleft LICENSEs intact, as the result of this project. These include modernizations of Jörn Zaefferer’s wonderful little 2007 J2.5/3 widget for JS-driven FAQ “accordion” under GPL/MIT licensure, and a redo of the Joomla custom theme templates wt_churchy, Churchy - Nonprofit Joomla Template, originally-authored by Webthemer / YOOtheme GmbH Copyright 2012 - 2016, affectionately-renamed under GPL3 wt_churchy_revival. We hope the now- Joomla6-compatible custom theme helps other churches establish a dynamic web presence, like it has Karl & Sun, and I hope every developer gets to work with clients so kind and seeing and friendly as this one–they truly put the MERRY in my and my family’s Merry Christmas. ❤️