upgrade-joomla-15-to-25Our project has been using Joomla! for designing school websites.

On 12 Feb 2012, We start planning to upgrade our school website from Joomla 1.5.20 to Joomla 2.5.1

We also restucture the school sitemap. After about 2 weeks of hardworking, We upload our upgraded website on February 25th 2012 at 16:15.

Why upgrade to Joomla 2.5

  • Joomla 2.5 is a long-term-support (LTS) release that will be supported for at least 18 months.
  • We want to get advantage from nested categories (not categories in section as in J 1.5)
  • Dynamic Articles Category module can create content menu automatically [demo]
  • Load module position in article () [demo]
  • Joomla 2.5 allowed one click update which is a built-in core function.

How to upgrade?

  1. We read http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_Joomla_1.5_to_Joomla_2.5
  2. Backup the whole site by using Akeeba Backup
  3. Create new database for restoring the site eg. rks25db
  4. Restore the backup to another sub-folder beside your live site eg. rks15 and database to rks25db (using kickstart) -- this should not affect your live site when upgrading
  5. Login to your rks15/administrator go to Content and go to empty your Article Trash
  6. Install the latest version of jUpgrade
  7. Enable System - Mootools Upgrade in Plugin Manager
  8. Read http://redcomponent.com/jupgrade
  9. Component > jUpgrade > Parameters: Skip Download=Yes | Target Directory=rainbow25 (will be used as your new site which is sub-folder of your site)
  10. Download the latest version of Joomla 2.5.x and rename it as joomla25.zip put it in your tmp -- reduce the download time while upgrading.
  11. Down the backup of your live site (via FTP from {joomlaroot}/administrator/components/com_akeeba/backup) then repeat step 3-7 9-10 on localhost -- This mean that we first test upgrade the site on localhost.
  12. Please read http://redcomponent.com/forum/92-jupgrade/102880-jupgrade-faq then localhost backend > Component > jUpgrade > START UPGRADE
  13. After sucessfull upgrade, move the sub-folder "rainbow25" to the root folder of www and make change to the configuration.php (public $log_path and public $tmp_path)
  14. Login to the back-end of new upgrade website rainbow25/administrator install new template and other extensions support version 2.5 make changes as you need test your site then back up your database via phpmyadmin
  15. With live site rks15 repeat step 12-13 then you will have rainbow25 live site, install all extensions the same as your localhost
  16. Restore your localhost database into rks25db
  17. That is all!