Do I need to upgrade to Joomla 2.5?

 

So do you need to upgrade to Joomla 2.5? That’s the first question you’ll be asking yourself. For those of you who remember the migration from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 I can feel you cringing already. It’s slightly easier this time around though but it’s still not a one click upgrade as the differences between 1.5 and the 1.6 stream, to which Joomla 2.5 belongs are significant. If you have a bunch of 1.5 websites you know that it will be alot of work. If you have a bunch of clients’s websites on 1.5 you need to inform them of the impact and the effort required in upgrading to the latest version along with the significant benefits that they will see.

Update: I have written a step-by-step tutorial showing how to upgrade to Joomla 2.5 here

As mentioned in my previous post “Joomla 2.5 Released” your old 1.5 websites will not stop working but security updates will stop when it is officially decommissioned in April 2012, which is just around the corner. So my recommendation is to migrate to 2.5 if you can and to concentrate on those websites that deal with eCommerce or sensitive data first.

Terminology: I use Upgrade to Joomla 2.5 a bit in this article as that’s what most people will term the process as but this is really a  migration. Probably should have called it Migrate to Joomla 2.5, but I’d probably confuse too many people!

How to I upgrade to Joomla 2.5?

Unfortunately there is no “upgrade path”. The changes between Joomla 1.5 and the Joomla 2.5 stream are quite significant to put it mildly, requiring site owners and developers to follow a migration path, i.e. a way in which the data from your current website is translated to the data schema of the new version. An additional, and major stumbling block for many is that much of the 1.5 extensions do not have corresponding Joomla 2.5 versions. So if you’re using something that’s not supported in 2.5 you’re either out of luck for that functionality or need to find another extension or core functionality that can fit the gap.

All is not lost however. There are two tools that can greatly help you to upgrade to Joomla 2.5:

Note: each extension can migrate your data to the new 2.5 format. You will however still need to copy over all of your images to an appropriate location and may also need to change or update your template.

Firstly there is Joomla.org’s recommended JUpgrade component. This extension was written by Matias Aquirre, the same kind sole who developed the MTWMigrator extension to help with Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 migration. Without that extension I may very well have given up on Joomla altogether when 1.5 came out. JUpgrade is very similar. Simply install the component into your Joomla 1.5 website, configure it with what data you want migrated, e.g. core data like articles, categories, users, etc + some supported 3rd party tools like the Kunena forums, K2 and Community Builder. The system will then automatically download the latest Joomla core, and install it in the root/jupgrade folder with all of your ported data. This way you can run your Joomla 1.5 website while you are configuring, updating and testing your brand new 2.5 website. Pretty cool eh?

Secondly there is a commercial extension called SP Upgrade. When I say commercial you do need to pay for this but at $30 it’s a steal IMO. It seems quite similar to Mattias’s old MTWMigrator component but it has a few extra features, one of which is that it can attempt to port your template over — do note that this isn’t foolproof however, it’s not guaranteed to work for templates. This one requires you to install a blank new Joomla and install the component there. Then you point it to the Joomla 1.5 database, tell it what you want ported and it will suck the relevant data in, giving some nice status updates along the way.

Both extensions are excellent though I do tend to use the latter at the moment, simply because it gives me so much information, e.g. it will list each of the rows in the user table that cannot be migrated if there is a problem. I also prefer building a blank Joomla 2.5 website and sucking the data into that rather than the subsite method of JUpgrade. Both tools work well however so it’s up to you which you use.

JUpgrade is available here.
SP Upgrade is available here.

More details on the upgrade process using JUpgrade can be found on joomla.org here. The article is old but everything still stands as 2.5 belongs to the1.6 stream.

Once you have migrated your data you will now need to install or convert your template and install new extensions to deal with whatever non-core functionality you require (unless you are only using 3rd party extensions supported by JUpgrade or SP Upgrade).

Do note that if you are on Joomla 1.6 or Joomla 1.7 that there is no need to migrate to Joomla 2.5. Just use Joomla’s inbuilt upgrader to do the work for you.

Update: I have written a step-by-step tutorial showing how to upgrade to Joomla 2.5 here

So hopefully this article has given you the information you need to make the decision to migrate to Joomla 2.5 or upgrade to Joomla 2.5 or not and if you have decided to do so I hope the pointers above makes it easier for you. Just in case you haven’t heard my excitement – “Joomla 2.5 is here!” Happy migrations!