Joomla 2.5 is a great version of Joomla, and most of the important Joomla extensions have been updated to work with Joomla 2.5. If you have a Joomla 1.5 site that is doing what you want, then you can probably wait until you find a compelling reason to upgrade. However, if you’re still using Joomla 1.0, you should consider upgrading to Joomla 2.5. With all Joomla upgrades, first make sure that the third party Joomla extensions on which your site depends are available in 2.5.
Once you decide that you want to upgrade, the next step is to decide if you have enough technical expertise to perform the upgrade yourself. If you don’t know how to work with phpMyAdmin, FTP, or cPanel, and you don’t know how to install Joomla, you should probably hire an expert to do the upgrade for you.
IMPORTANT: If your website has 10-30 pages, it might be faster to copy and paste the page content into a new, clean install of Joomla 1.7. You should definitely consider this method is your site is small. It’s probably the fastest way to upgrade if you have a smaller site.
Joomla Website Upgrades: Call us at 303-907-6133 to get an estimate for upgrading your Joomla website
Because each site varies in complexity and size, we cannot provide a fixed price for upgrading your site.
Templates
Your 1.0 template will not work in 1.5, and your 1.5 template will not work in 1.7. You could modify the template to work in 1.7, but this will require php coding skills. Furthermore, unless your template was built in the last few years, I recommend buying or building a new template. Most old Joomla templates have table-based layout and outdated css and html code.
Make a Backup
Always make a complete backup of your Joomla database and all Joomla files before you attempt to upgrade your site. If you have a complete backup, you can restore your original site if the upgrade breaks your site. For a quick, easy way to backup your Joomla website, install Akeeba Backup; Akeeba Backup has a one-step backup process that creates a backup / installation file of your Joomla database and all Joomla files.
Create a test site
I recommend that you create a sub domain on your web account for the Joomla 1.5 site. I also recommend that you make a copy of your live site, install it on a sub-domain, and then perform the upgrade there rather than on the live site. If you perform the upgrade on the sub domain, there is NO chance that you will accidentally break your live site. Again, before you do any of this, make a complete backup of your live Joomla site.
Upgrade Joomla
If you have a Joomla 1.0 site, you first need to upgrade it to Joomla 1.5 and then to Joomla 1.7.
Migrate Your Third Party Extensions?
There might be a migration tool for your third party extensions. If so, you should follow their instructions for the migration. Many extensions won’t need migration since they don’t really hold data other than settings.
Migrate Joomla 1.0 to 1.5
Joomla.org provides excellent instructions and Migrator software for this upgrade:
http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_1.0.x_to_1.5_Stable
Below are steps describing the process:
- Read all the instructions in the Joomla Migration document.
- From the Joomla 1.0 administration screen, install the 1.5 Migrator.
- Use the 1.5 Migrator to create an Migration SQL file.
- Install Joomla 1.5 on your test site. During the installation, you have the option to import the content from your Joomla 1.0 site, but if you miss this, you can install the jUpgrade tool and use that to import your content.
When you finish the upgrade, check out your content migration. As long as it all came through, I woudn’t worry too much about the formatting since you still need to upgrade to 1.7. You might find broken image links or broken links. This is probably due to pasting SEF URLs in links rather than using the Link tool, or you may have included your domain name in your image links. In either case, you will have to fix these, but you wait until you upgrade to 1.7.
Sarah Marsh says
Could you detail this a little more maybe? “Because the 2.5 upgrade will change most of your URLs, you will have to create 301 redirects in the .htaccess file. If you fail to do this, all of your pages that are listed in Google will be broken links. Eventually, Google will update these URLs, but your page rank could drop if you don’t create the redirects BEFORE your new site goes live.”
I know this article is two years old, but I’m trying to fix the site I just began redesigning! Thanks!
Pat Fortino says
I have found that most urls are fine, but if they are in sections in 1.5, then you will have an addition layer in your link because jupgrade replaces sections with categories; eg, /section/category becomes /category/category. Most of the time this won’t create problems, but it makes urls longer.
And yes, you will probably have to write redirects for all urls.