Migrating DART Creations from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5

After the announcement that Joomla 1.0 will no longer be supported and after using Joomla 1.5 for a long time, we have decided to take the plunge and migrate to Joomla 1.5.

Our major concerns:

1. Keeping ALL current Search Engine Optimized links. We have built quite a good position, and we need to ensure this position is maintained.

2. 3rd Party components. DART Creations has a number of 3rd party components which are the heart and soul of the website, including the Downloads area and the Forums. We would like to keep these components intact, with all current data.

3. Smooth transition and minimal downtime - traffic is our livelihood. Loss of traffic means lost clients to us ... so downtime has to be kept to the absolute minimum.

This is our journey ... we will post what we did, how we did, what problems we encountered and how we solved them and any other interesting stuff.

Backup

Remember, before you perform any major changes, create a backup!

Step 1: Create the new Joomla installation

Step 2: Migrating Joomla database / supported 3rd party migrators

We now want to migrate Joomla database. Joomla has a migrator component which can be used. Therefore, we downloaded the migrator, installed on the Joomla 1.0 website.

A number of 3rd party components have migrators which integrate into the Joomla migrator. You now need to install these 3rd party migrators.

After installing all 3rd party component migrators, we ran the migration script and downloaded the file. The time it takes to complete the migration will vary according to the size of your database. For our site it took roughly 20 minutes.

Step 3: Install migrator data 

In step 6 of the new Joomla 1.5 installation, we stopped and loaded the migrator file, and import was successful. So far so good. Removed installation directory and browsed to file. Joomla content looks to have been migrated correctly.

Step 4: Installing / Migrating 3rd party components

Migrating DOCMan

Installed latest version of DOCMan, and downloaded files in dmdocuments folder to the current installation. Strangely the content from DOCMan was not available although we used the Migrator. After a posting to the DOCMan support forums, we realised the DOCMan tables were empty. We looked for the actual docman content in the migrator script, copied the "Insert" scripts and imported all the entries manually to the new database via phpmyadmin. This seems to have sorted the issue and content was now available in the new installation. Kudos to the DOCMan support team which really helped to sort out the issue.

Migrating !JoomlaComment

DART Creations has been powered by !JoomlaComment since its inception. The first major concern and task was the upgrade to the current version, since the version we were using was not supported any longer. Therefore, after performing a backup, we updated to the latest version of JoomlaComment. Joomla 1.5 supports the version of JoomlaComment we had upgraded too, and migration is simple a copy of the tables from the Joomla 1.0 database to the Joomla 1.5 database. Therefore, we installed the latest version on Joomla 1.5, and then using phpmyadmin, we exported the tables. In the Joomla 1.5 database, we imported the new database.

The new database did not support the email and website fields being NULL, so we had to change the settings in the table to allow NULL values. Hopefully, this will not create problems. After migration of the table, we returned the values back to not allowing nulls.

After importing the tables, we checked the comments, and they have been migrated quite nicely.

Migrating FireBoard Forum

Again, it looks like FireBoard uses the same database tables between Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5. Therefore, we export the Joomla 1.0 tables and import them into the new tables on Joomla 1.5. Content is migrated very nicely.

Problems encountered:

Strangely, FireBoard 1.0.4 with Joomla 1.5 in Legacy mode does not support the FireBoard positions, which are typically used for AdSense or other advertisements within posts. Therefore, to display your AdSense in FireBoard and Joomla 1.5, you'll have to tweak the FireBoard template. Here is what we did:

In the following file: components/com_fireboard/template/default/message.php we found the following code:

<?php
if (mosCountModules('fb_msg_1'))
{
?>

    <div class = "fb_msg_t">
        <?php
        mosLoadModules('fb_msg_1', -2);
        ?>
    </div>

<?php
}
?>

deleted it, and replaced it the the AdSense code. Seems like this is the way to go to insert AdSense into FireBoard with Joomla 1.5. You can do the same for the rest of the positions which you want to use, i.e. 

fb_msg_t

fb_msg_1

fb_msg_2

fb_msg_b

Migrating sh404SEF

sh404SEF does not support migration, however, provided the same configuration is kept the same URLs will be generated. We tested this, and the results seem to be correct.

Step 4: Migrating modules

Although content is migrated using the migrator, modules are not migrated. Thus these need to be recreated in the new Joomla 1.5 website. For core modules, this is not a problem, however, for 3rd party modules you'll need to find the equivalents for Joomla 1.5 and set the configuration accordingly.

Step 5 - Test and deploy :)

Well, basically you'll always have to go through most of the content of your site and make sure that everything looks ok and fix any issues which crop up. This step is still not done here, but we thought we'd share the experience straight away.