How to Upgrade from Joomla 1.0.0 to Joomla 2.5.1

Yesterday, we worked on a website that was using Joomla 1.0.0. The owner of the website had three problems:

• Problem #1: The website was displaying “Your are not authorized to view this resource” on the homepage. Well, it wasn’t technically the homepage, as the website had a flash introduction that was redirecting to an article on the website. The cause of the problem was that the article the flash introduction was redirecting to was unpublished. We solved the problem by publishing the article again.

• Problem #2: Every page on his website was displaying the following warning (no content was displayed – just this warning): “Warning: Parameter 1 to HTML_content::show() expected to be a reference, value given in /public_html/includes/Cache/Lite/Function.php on line 92”. The cause of this problem was because Joomla 1.0.0 is incompatible with PHP 5.3 and above. We fixed the problem by changing going to the Function.php file, and changing every instance of $arguments in the parameters of the function call_user_func_array to &$arguments.

• Problem # 3: The contact us page had the following error: “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare quoted_printable_encode() in /public_html/includes/vcard.class.php on line 37”. The cause of this problem is that the function quoted_printable_encode is now included in PHP (versions equal or above 5.3.0) so it was being redefined in the code. We solved the problem by commenting out the function (you can also solve it by changing the name of the function to quoted_printable_encode2) in the vcard.class.php file.

Needless to say, all these problems happened following the upgrade of PHP on the server where our client’s website resides. Although the PHP upgrade directly caused these problems, it was definitely the right thing to do. The PHP version that was installed before was really old and the server needed to support newer applications – regardless of whether this upgrade causes very old applications to break (we suspect that’s the reason why GoDaddy still has a very old version of PHP on some of its old servers that does not support Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 2.5.1 – GoDaddy just doesn’t want to break old websites that are hosted on its servers)

In any case, we recommended our client to upgrade to the latest version of Joomla because of the following reasons:

1. Joomla 1.0.0 is no longer supported: Joomla 1.0.0 was released nearly 7 years ago (back in September of 2005) and its official support was discontinued many, many years ago.

2. Joomla 1.0.0 has many security holes that were addressed in later versions of Joomla. Joomla 1.0.0 was the developers’ first take at customer management systems (well, more or less, since most of these developers were working on Mambo before).

3. Joomla 1.0.0 will not work on new servers. This is because it suffers from compatibility problems with newer versions of PHP and MySQL (MySQL compatibility problems are common in very old Joomla extensions).

4. The administrator will be missing on all the latest extensions when using Joomla 1.0.0. This is because all the current extensions are mainly written for Joomla 1.5 and up.

5. Non-official support is scarce for very old versions of Joomla. While we, at itoctopus, support every version of Joomla, most of our competitors don’t. Which means that it’s really hard to get support when you have a very old Joomla website.

Our client then emailed us back asking about the process involved in upgrading from Joomla 1.0.0 to Joomla 2.5.1 and how much time it’ll take. So we explained the process the following way:

• We will need to upgrade through hops – e.g. upgrade from Joomla 1.0.0 to Joomla 1.0.3 to Joomla 1.0.13, etc… And at every hop we need to test the website, make sure that everything is working properly, fix any bugs, re-test the website, backup the website, and then do the next upgrade.

• We will have many hops to move from Joomla 1.0.0 to Joomla 1.5.25.

• We will definitely be faced by the challenges that some (if not all) of the 3^rd party extensions will no longer work and we need to fix them.

• We will be faced by the problem that some of the content will not be migrated properly – especially content generated by 3^rd party extensions, and we will need to migrate that content manually.

• Once we reach Joomla 1.5.25, we can then migrate directly to Joomla 2.5.1

Of course, the time it takes to migrate from Joomla 1.0.0 to Joomla 2.5.1 depends on the number of 3^rd party extensions and the amount of data your website has. Generally, the process takes anything between 12 hours and 2 days.

If you have a Joomla 1.0.0 then we strongly advise that you update it the latest version of Joomla. Your website may soon encounter problems with your hosting environment (especially if you’re on shared hosting), is prone to security attacks, and you’ll be missing on the myriad of Joomla extensions out there. We can help you do this, just contact us and we’ll take it from there! We are fast, we are efficient, we care about your business, and our rates are very affordable! What are you waiting for?