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With the release of Joomla 2.5 a few days ago, we begin to receive quite an influx of requests for guidance on migrating to Joomla 2.5 with JomSocial users and data intact. This tutorial will guide you with hopefully detailed steps on moving Joomla 1.5’s data into Joomla 2.5, and steps needed to safely transfer JomSocial users and data into the brand new site.

If you are not a JomSocial user and looking to only migrate Joomla 1.5, don’t worry, the following instructions are perfectly valid as once you have completed Part 6, the migration is complete.

We have tested 3 migration components listed in JED  and will provide our findings for each of them. We are hoping that this guide will provide our dear users with a thorough and intimate understanding of how each migrator operates and choose the best option to suit your requirement.


Requirements

1. The website must be at least on Joomla 1.5.21 (the minimum version that JomSocial supports)

2. A running JomSocial 2.4.2 or above (optional, if you wish to migrate JomSocial data)

3. An instance of Apache running locally / in localhost. The easiest method would be having XAMPP installed.


We initiate this migration experiment by utilizing jUpgrade.  jUpgrade is a popular migrator which has helped many to move from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.6/1.7 not so long ago. It is frequently mentioned in numerous Joomla migration articles, in the Joomla Community blog, and also within the official Joomla Wiki.


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.




Ok, remember when I said J2XML seems to be the cleanest? Well, SP Upgrade on the other hand seems to be the easiest. I was first reluctant to try this migrator given its cost (Euro 25), even more so when I notice how tiny the migrator is. At 13kb, it is certainly the smallest migrator, and component that I have ever encountered! Boy I was fooled. It packs a punch for its size. If you are willing to spend a bit, this migrator is certainly the one.



Once you are satisfied, and have verified that the migrated tables are in working order, follow these steps to replace the live Joomla 1.5 with the newly migrated Joomla 2.5 website.

 


At this stage, it is assumed that Joomla User information has been successfully migrated to Joomla 2.5, and their information such as userid, username, password and email are intact. Again, userid MUST be intact! If your Administrator userid was 62 in Joomla 1.5, it has to be 62 in Joomla 2.5. This is the point where J2XML failed in our previous migration attempt. What a pity since it could have been one perfectly suited component for our needs. 

Before we get started, the first thing that you will need to do on the newly migrated Joomla 2.5 is to install JomSocial. Yes, that’s right. This step is important for Joomla to capture JomSocial as an installed component, and for JomSocial to generate JomSocial Toolbar in the menu system.