How to Migrate Users from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5

Some websites don’t have that much content – but they do have a lot of users. Such websites include charity websites, political websites, and some subscription websites. For these websites, it makes more sense to re-create the website from scratch in Joomla 2.5 (instead of migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – which can be a costly and a length process) and then re-create the content on the new website.

Since the content is usually scarce, then re-creating the website is not usually a problem. However, re-creating its users can be a problem when there are many, so these users should be automatically migrated.

There are two ways to migrate users from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5:

1. The easy and error prone way

2. The advanced and efficient way

The easy way consists of installing an extension called userport (try googling “userport joomla”) on the old (Joomla 1.5) website and the new (Joomla 2.5) website. This extension will allow you to export your users from your old website to a CSV file and then import them in the new website.

Although this seems to be like an easy task – it’s usually not a smooth experience, here’s why:

• CSV files are not a good way for exporting and importing sensitive data – this is because the data’s integrity can be affected when it contains the CSV separator (which can be a comma, a semi column, or a tab). It is very rare not to have this problem especially if the number of users being imported is large.

• The ids of the users in the old database will not be preserved – they will be lost during the import process. This means that associations with other areas may be broken post-migration.

• If two users have the same name, then the import will fail, generating the following the message: “Failed to update contact: COM_CONTACT_WARNING_SAME_NAME” Error on Joomla

The userport extension does work from time to time, but from our experience, it is better not to use it and follow the hard way to migrate your users to Joomla 2.5.

So, how do you migrate users the hard (and more efficient and less error prone) way?

The hard way consists of migrating users using phpMyAdmin. Since we have done this many times already, we have written a guide that can help anyone with some technical experience to do this migration himself. We have decided to share this guide on the itoctopus website:

1. Export the users from the old jos_users table

   The export of the users should be done the following way:

   1. Run the following query in the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin:

      SELECT `id`,`name`,`username`,`email`,`password`,`block`,`params` FROM `jos_users` WHERE 1 AND id != 62;

      The above query will get all the users’ information from the old table (we excluded the user with the id 62 because it’s the default super administrator on Joomla 1.5 and we already have a super administrator on Joomla 2.5).

   2. Once the query is run, you will see an “Export” button at the bottom of the page under Query results operations – click that button (please note that there’s another “Export” button just below the query results which shouldn’t be used because it doesn’t export the results of the current query).

   3. You will now see a page titled “Exporting rows from “jos_users” table”. Choose “Custom – display all possible options”, and then scroll down and choose “View output as text”, and then uncheck “CREATE TABLE options” and finally click on “Go” at the bottom of the page.

   4. You now have a query that inserts all the users but it’s still pointing to the old jos_ table. Copy and paste that query in a text editor and replace jos_ with the table alias of your new Joomla website. You need to do a replace all as there might be several instances of jos_ in that query.

   5. You are now ready to import the users!

2. Import the users into your new Joomla table

   Now that you have prepared the data in the steps above, all you need to do to import the data is the following:

   1. Paste the query generated above in the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin and run it. This query will import the users, but we will need to add those users to a group – usually group 2. (If you care about which group each user belonged to then contact us and we’ll help you do it as we have not covered this scenario here).

   2. To add all the exported users to group “2”, follow the below steps:

      1. Run the following query in the SQL tab:

         Select `id`, 2 FROM `jos_users` WHERE 1

      2. Export the results of that query using the method described above for exporting users. (e.g. press on the “Export” button below and then choose “Custom”, click on “View Output as Text”, uncheck “CREATE TABLE”, and click on “Go”)

      3. Copy the generated query from the above step into a text editor and change the following line:

         INSERT INTO `jos_users` (`id`, `2`) VALUES

         to this one:

         INSERT INTO `[table_prefix]_user_usergroup_map` (`user_id`, `group_id`) VALUES

         [table_prefix] should be replaced with the prefix of your tables for the new Joomla website.

      4. Now copy the modified query to the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin and run it.

      5. You have finished the user migration! (Congratulations!)

Clearly the advanced way may take some more time especially if your technical experience is not that strong – but if you do have a solid technical experience, then it should only take a little of your time!

Some caveats:

• User migration using the userport extension will not keep the original ids of the users – which means that all the content (such as articles) associated with one user might be associated with another after the user migration (in the new website).

• User migration using the phpMyAdmin method will maintain id association with the exception of the id of the super administrator.

• Since ids are unique make sure you filter the query to insert users for any ids that already exist in the new table prior to running it – otherwise the query will crash during execution – and not all users will be imported.

Migrating users from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 is easier than you might think – but we do understand if you don’t want to indulge yourself in the land of not-so-solid extensions and phpMyAdmin, and that’s why we’re here to help! All you need to do is to contact us and we’ll promise you that we’ll get your users exported and imported in no time and with little cost! We’re very reliable, we love our clients, and our clients love us!