Merged How to move, copy or merge my old Kunena forums from one site to another

It is all a recent installation

First of all, the support offered in this forum is about problems that may occur on an existing installation of Kunuena. Doing things like moving Kunena from one site to another (irrespective of whether they are using different Joomla frameworks) is an entirely different question. That is why I have moved the topic started by zombies from our Support category and merged it with the, more general "advice", topic here.

We all spend a lot of time searching for a reliable platform upon which we can build our websites. Sometimes our first attempt to build something isn't successful and we have to start again. Sometimes the cost (in time and/or money) of salvaging something from a failed attempt is simply too high to justify and it may be better to start all over again.

zombies wrote: It is all a recent installation

It takes about 1 minute to install K 1.7.1 and it works immediately ... without having to do anything.

It's possible - anything is possible - to move K 1.7 from a J! 1.7 site to a J! 1.5 website but, it's my guess, that it would take a couple of hours ... and that's assuming that you know what you're doing with SQL tables. So there you have the choice:

(1) Install K 1.7.1 on your new J! 1.5 website; or
(2) Copy and fiddle about with the database tables and the attachments from the J! 1.7 site and put them on your J! 1.5 site.

Going forward from J! 1.5 to J! 1.7 is difficult enough - see what has been written in this topic (msg #4 will explain what you have to do) - but going back the other way is going to be just as hard if not harder. Good luck.

Abandoned it, some sql tables in 1.7 do not exist in 1.5 and vise versa

I actually wanted to use sobi2 within my site but might try K2 or similar that works in 1.7
just that I have used sobi2 quite a bit so know how to use it.

hey ho

zombies wrote: Abandoned it.

Sounds reasonable to me; that's what I would have done, too. Sorry, I don't know anything about Sobi2 or K2 - the only thing I've read is that the developers of K2 have expressed their view that they're terribly interested co-operating with Kunena (and that may be a reason to decide not to use that product ... I don't know). Good luck.

I too use SOBI2 and have many issues due to there being no migration path from SOBI2 to SOBI Pro. However, this new version of SOBI does exist. Maybe migrating once to SOBI Pro will bring more options in the future......like components that have clear upgrade/migration options?

Moving Kunena from J!1.7 to J!1.5:

You can move data all from Kunena just like you would migrate Joomla from 1.5 into 1.7:

1) Copy all the Kunena files from /media/kunena and make sure that the file permissions are right
2) Copy #__kunena tables from one database to another (#_ = Joomla prefix, remember to change it, too)
3) Fix category permissions for each category as they are different in Joomla 1.5 and 1.7

Just remember that this only moves Kunena, not the users. So if the users aren't identical in both sites, all the messages end up to wrong users (or new users after they register into your site).

Matias wrote: Just remember that this only moves Kunena, not the users. So if the users aren't identical in both sites, all the messages end up to wrong users (or new users after they register into your site) ...

... which basically means that you finish up with a totally unusable forum. :pinch:

But, yes, you can move these things. :whistle:

Can't the posts/user ID's be reassigned in the Kunena tables if that happens? For someone with a relatively small number of people it still may be practical.

I have a Kunena forum on an old J1.5 site that I had no way to migrate to a new J1.5 site so I had to start all over. I am now in the process of starting a J1.7 site to replace that site. I would love to find a way to merge all of it. I used the ARRA user migration from one J1.5 site to the other so it may maintain the same user ID's. I'd have to check, but even this may not be permanent if you can modify the user ID's in Kunena.

karaokeamerica wrote: Can't the posts/user ID's be reassigned in the Kunena tables if that happens? For someone with a relatively small number of people it still may be practical.

Yes

For a small forum it's easy to convert all user ids (as long as you do it in the right order so you don't end up moving messages from user 123 to 150 when there are posts from 150). But if the user IDs are the same or there aren't too many of them, task is very simple.

Things get much harder if you have a lot of users or you have forum installed into both of the sites.