I’m trying to upgrade Joomla Version 1.5.20 to Joomla Version 2.5.4.
I’ve upgraded other CMS’s in the past, but Joomla seems to be a little different. Does anyone have any advice as to the best way to upgrade?
So far I’ve:
- Downloaded the entire site
- Exported the database via phpMyAdmin
I’ve installed MAMP and Joomla locally and I’m trying to replicate their site on my machine in attempt to upgrade locally before doing it live. I’ve loaded the template, but haven’t been able to load the content yet.
There seems to be a lot of versions between 1.5.20 and 2.5.4, and it’s making me a bit nervous.
You can’t directly upgrade from a Joomla! 1.5.x version to the 2.5.x line, it’s a migration.
As the 2.5 line is a big change to Joomla! you will have to find 2.5 versions of:
Version 2.5 has new technical requirements so you will need to check that your server meets those.
Once you’ve got all that resolved.
First thing you should do is upgrade a backup of your 1.5.x site to the latest version ie. 1.5.26 as it fixes some security issues, and the recent versions included 1 or 2 bugs that help with the migration.
Once you have that working you will need to use a migration tool as discussed in this document. Please note that while this document references JUpgrade, you would probably be better off looking at one of the other conversion tools, especially the commercial products (which aren’t expensive at all).
We’re about half way through migrating over 200 client websites and while we started out with the free ‘recommended’ component we now use the commercial SP Upgrade (I have no affiliation with this product other than purchasing it and using it happily).