So you have a Joomla 1.5 website with Custom Properties and you want to upgrade to Joomla 1.7, but you are unsure about upgrading, fearing you could lose all your work. Well, it turned out that upgrading, with the right tools, is not that traumatic.
To upgrade or not to upgrade
Before deciding to upgrade one should make sure that the site can be upgraded to J17 in all its parts. Internationalization in J15 is mostly done with JoomFish, while J17 has a different (and partial) solution built into his core. Many extensions are not yet available for J17 or might not be backward compatible. So, a thoughtful analysis is paramount before starting.
Recommended reading : http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_Joomla_1.5_to_Joomla_1.6
Step by step
- Download JUpgrade
- Download Custom Properties plugin for JUpgrade
- Purchase Custom Properties 2.0 for Joomla 1.7
- Backup, backup, backup. As long as we can attest the procedure is safe and JUpgrade doesn't overwrite your original installation, yet it's better safe than sorry.
- Install JUpgrade
- Unzip the CP plugin and place the files into administrator/components/com_jupgrade/extensions directory
- Run jUpgrade (Components > jUpgrade > Click the big 'Start Upgrade' button
- Enter the newly-created J17 site's backend
- Install Custom Properties 2.0 for J1.7
- Verify that CP tags have been migrated properly.
- Adjust module assignment: the old J15 template and the new J17 one could very possibly have different positions.
- If successful, perform cleanup operations and go live.
Screenshots
Basic Joomla 1.5 site, with Custom Properties
jUpgrade installed
jUpgrade plugin files in position
The big 'Start upgrade' button
Step 10: Joomla 1.7 site with Custom Properties and properly migrated CPtags