Should I migrate from joomla 1.0 to joomla 1.5 is a question a lot of webmasters are asking themselves for the moment. There's quit some information which can be found on this topic on the official joomla site forum. This article is about my view, based on my own experience on this topic.

No upgrade path.
Joomla 1.5 is very different from Joomla 1.0. A big part of the code and the API was rewritten from scratch. That's the reason why the decision was made not to provide an upgrade path. With an upgrade, you can simply overwrite your installation, execute some SQL queries and your site is upgraded. Providing an upgrade feature from joomla 1.0 to joomla 1.5 was nearly impossible. In stead a migrate path was provided. The difference is that you'll have to do a fresh installation of joomla 1.5 and all third party extensions and then you'll need to migrate all your data. There is a migration tool to help you with data migration, but this is only for data of the joomla core, not of third party extensions.

Do You really need to upgrade?
First ask yourself if you really need to migrate. I'm very enthousiastic about the new features of joomla 1.5, but I would advice not to migrate unless you really need to. Migrating an existing site might be quit a task, so be prepared for that. Some third party extensions won't be easy to migrate. At the time of writing this article, there is no stable release of joomla 1.5 yet. This means that all joomla1.5-RC2 sites will have to upgrade to the first stable release in the (near?) future. When upgrading from RC1 to RC2, I had quit some problems on my own site. The problems you might have will be with third party extensions. This is logical as the upgrade of the core has been tested, but the influence on third party extensions hasn't been tested. If you can wait a bit longer, my advice would be to wait until the first stable release of joomla 1.5.

Is migration possible for you?
Before starting, you'll have to check something else. A lot of extensions are not yet joomla 1.5 compatible. So don't start migrating, before you verified if all your important extensions are 1.5 compatible. Even worse: some extensions claim to be 1.5 compatible, but are in fact not. In theory, every extension should work once you enabled the legacy plugin. From my own experience I would say: don't count on it! Even if you think that migration is possible for you, always take into account that your migration might fail and that one of your essential third party extensions isn't working properly. So don't throw away your joomla 1.0 site before your new joomla 1.5 is completely up and running!

Let's migrate
Once you know for sure that you want to migrate, you can start. You'll have to perform an automated migration for your core data and do a fresh Joomla 1.5 installation. After that, you'll have to do a manual migration for your third party data. How you should do this, is clearly explained on the migration tool manual. Some remarks about this page:

• The link to the migration component is broken. You can find the correct link to the migration component in the resources list below.
• Some people have had problems with the migration tool. With the latest version of the tool however, it should work for most installations.
• People with problems can report this on the Joomla forum
• There will be a complete Migration Guide. For the moment this is not ready yet.

Conclusion and advice

• Migration is possible and won't give to much problems in most cases. It is however not foolproof, so always keep in mind that it might turn out to be a difficult task and that you might have to switch back to Joomla 1.0.
• If you have a lot of third party extensions with data that needs to be migrated, migration could give quit some problems. Certainly if you don't have much technical skills it can turn out to be a real nightmare.
• Don't do migration unless you really need or want to. If it's not urgent, wait until the first stable release of Joomla 1.5
• If you are starting a brand new site then spare yourself a future migration and go for joomla 1.5 right away.

Resources:
Ulti Joomla
migration tool manual
Migration component


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