We’re doing many migrations from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 after people discover (the hard way) that these migrations are not that easy at all! Most of the companies/individuals that we migrate their Joomla websites for have already tried to do the migration themselves by following the (incomplete and broken) guide on Joomla’s official website. The main step in that guide (responsible for downloading, extracting, and installing Joomla 2.5 and migrating some of the content), instructs the Joomla administrator to install jUpgrade to do that. Now while jUpgrade often works properly when it comes to installing Joomla 2.5 (which is the easiest and fastest step in the migration), it is not reliable at all when it comes to migrating the content. Here’s why:
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The code of migrating the content is located on another server: Apparently, those who created this extension don’t want to give it out their source code (that’s their right and we respect that) – but the thing is, having the code to migrate the content on another server other than the one hosting the Joomla website means 2 things:
- The company hosting the migration code will have a copy of your database – this is a major security issue especially if there is some confidential data on your Joomla website.
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The migration can take an awfully long time especially on medium to large websites.
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jUpgrade hangs 9 out of 10 times: This is expected, because jUpgrade sends the old content (the content to be migrated) to another server which processes that content, and then sends back a copy of the content modified to work on Joomla 2.5 to the client. Imagine what will happen if there’s a lot of content or if there are connection issues during the migration process. Yes – you’ve guessed it – the migration process will hang!
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jUpgrade does not take into consideration interdependencies between components: One of the main drawbacks of jUpgrade is that, in most cases, it doesn’t take interdependecies between different components into consideration. While jUpgrade is, in some cases, able to identify and correctly handle the interdpendecies between menus, menu items, articles, and categories, it is not able to do that for 3rd party extensions. For example, if you have a commenting extension that links a comment to an article based on the article id, the right link between the comment(s) and the article will be lost because the id of the article changes during the jUpgrade content migration.
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jUpgrade confuses the administrator with its weird backup: Just before the migration process takes place, jUpgrade backs up all the Joomla tables in the same database – which is a good step – except that jUpgrade does it in a very weird way that confuses even the most experienced Joomla administrator out there. Anyone who did tried to do the migration will know what we mean.
At itoctopus, we don’t use jUpgrade because we think it’s very unreliable – and until Joomla developers come up with a decent, non-intrusive, and secure way to migrate Joomla websites from 1.5 to 2.5, we suggest you either do the migration manually or call on some Joomla experts to do that for you! By the way, we are Joomla experts, so how about you contact us to do the migration for you? We’ve done this many times so far and we’ll be happy to do it for you for a very reasonable price!