Joomla 2.5 Migrator Review J2XML Importer

J2XML seems to be the cleanest way to migrate users and content in Joomla 2.5 with the use of XML files. I was almost led to believe this little component should be the focus of this migration tutorial, but I was disappointed at the end of my experiment to find out it has one very serious omission that may cause other migrated components to fail.

If you wish to simply migrate Joomla Users and Content, and to start clean on Joomla 2.5 with new components (these components having fresh data), then this is the quickest path to achieve it. But if you wish to migrate data from other components such as JomSocial, Kunena, jReviews or others, you might want to avoid this migrator and rely on either jUpgrade or SP Upgrade instead.

How it works

J2XML consists of two separate components where by one has to be installed on the original Joomla 1.5 site to export information as XML files and the other one acts as an ‘importer’ which has to be installed on the new Joomla 2.5 website. It is by far the cleanest of all those three migrators, and has the potential to be the best. 

One drawback though, a big one that is. It seems that at the end of the migration phase, the component will actually modify userid, which means while the user information such as email, username and password is intact, his ID is not.

This is a serious omission in my point of view, as having a different userid will directly cause a mismatch between Joomla and other third party components that map their database information with the userid. In real world, it will cause JomSocial to assign streams, profile information and all other media to the wrong user, Kunena to assign permissions, forum posts, etc to different person, and other possible funky mishaps in other components due to a mismatched userid.

Setting it up

1. As mentioned, J2XML has the cleanest method of migrating Joomla User & Content. What you will need to do is to simply set up a Joomla 2.5 site, either as a separate directory within the live site (for example http://www.domain.com/joomla25) or create a local Joomla 2.5 site.

2. Download J2XML 

3. Install J2XML in the Joomla 1.5 website via Joomla Install/Uninstall area.

4. Once completed, go to Plugin Manager, and enable XML-RPC - J2XML API and System - J2XML plugins.

5. To export your users, simply go to Joomla User Manager, and you will notice two new options. Select all your users and export them away! An XML file will be created to store the exported information.

6. To export your articles, go to Joomla Article Manager, select all your articles, and export them.  An XML file will be created to store the exported information.

7. With the export completed, now its time to import them into Joomla 2.5. Download J2XML Importer. 

8. Install the component using Joomla 2.5 Installer.

9. Once done, go to Components > J2XML Importer

10. Pick the XML file that contain user information, and press import.

11. Repeat the procedure to import Joomla Articles.

12. Be vigilant on possible errors, particularly with regard to user information and content structure. Go to Joomla 2.5’s User Manager, Article Manager, Categories, Plugins and Modules, and play around with them. In User Manager, locate some users that you know and check whether their information is correct. Try updating some users, see whether they are saved. Poke here and there. :)

13. You are now done! It is really easy, isn’t it? If you wish upload the migrated files into the live site, please follow Part 6 onwards.

Navigation. You are now reading Part 4 of a series of 7.
Part 1: Migrating Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5, a guided tutorial
Part 2: Preparing Joomla 1.5 site for Joomla 2.5 migration
Part 3: Comparison of Joomla 2.5 Migrators. In review: jUpgrade
Part 4: Joomla 2.5 Migrator Review J2XML Importer
Part 5: Joomla 2.5 Migrator Review SP Upgrade
Part 6: Moving Joomla 2.5 from localhost to live site
Part 7: Migrating JomSocial Data into Joomla 2.5