Merged Forum transfer (not a merge): from J! 1.5 to J! 2.5 - SP Upgrade

Hi Sozzled,

The big difference is the user table (the Joomla user table, not the Kunena one) and making sure that you map the users from your old J! 1.5 installation correctly in your J! 2.5 installation. Evidently, SP Upgrade does not seem to cater for this major difference.

The essential difference in J! 1.5 is that the user-ids start at 62. In J! 2.5 they start at 42. jUpgrade doesn't change the user-ids.

SP Upgrade doesn't change the user ID's either. It renames the old Admin (ID #62)to adminv15 and it creates a new admin (ID #42) and other than these two changes all the other ID's remain the same. This was the reason I thought that the export/import process would work.

I've now gone through the initial migrate with jUpgrade and I can see why I wanted to try the other one. I'll write a new post with ongoing edits with the issues or uncertainties I encounter with jUpgrade as I discover them (not because I am expecting help with each one but just to keep a log in case others encounter the same things) along with any solutions I am able to find.

With any luck it may help someone else who is just as much of a novice as I am to have a step by step process (and maybe even two versions) that caters to someone with little technical knowledge of some possible issues and some solutions when they go through the same process.

It still would be great to know why the database import/export process didn't work if the users are the same. Is there something else I may have missed?

Thanks again

As sort of a case study and with the risk of looking like I know next to nothing (which is probably true) ... here's the process I am trying to follow to go from J1.5.26 to J2.5.4 using jUpgrade (and some comparisons and a parallel migration with SP Upgrade along the way) along with the issues I encounter and (hopefully) some solutions as well. This is in the hopes that someone who has a similar pathway and site content to me won't have to go through the endless hours of research and dead ends to solve similar issues. Some of these may be "obvious" to many ... but they certainly weren't (and aren't) to me. My site is a fairly basic site with a "club" template (which has a 2.5 version available) and a few extra extensions, modules, and plugins which all have upgrades available except one (a glossary I'm using and will have to replace with another) and of course Kunena and some Kunena extensions (such as Discuss).

While a lot of this of course has to do with Joomla and has nothing to do with Kunena ... because the two go hand in hand, issues with one will (sometimes seriously) affect the other. My goal here is to have a working 2.5 site as close to the 1.5 site as possible with the priority of having Kunena fully functional and completely transferred (users and posts) from one Joomla version to another with as little damage to any part of the rest of the site or changes to URL's, rankings, and overall site configuration as possible.

So far this has involved a couple of intensely frustrating weeks and it often seems I am not much closer to getting the job done to the point where it can go live than when I started. Even though I'm learning lots and inching closer to what I hope will be success, it seems that much of what I think I need to learn along the way to fix all the issues that come up end up having little relevance to what I am trying to accomplish. Every time I think I have a path to success, something pops up that forces me to re-think or re-do everything all over again.

As Sozzle has said ... this is a really intimidating and frustrating task for someone who has little understanding of some of the many things involved and the "possible explanations" and solutions all over the web for various issues that will almost certainly be encountered along the way and it can sometimes take hours or days of research and trial and error to fix something (or sometimes not fix it at all) that seems to be a minor issue or that someone with more knowledge could probably do in minutes or maybe an hour or two. There seem to be an endless number of "reasons" and "fixes" for every one of the many issues that most people seem to encounter ... and most of them are either wrong or way too complex to follow (at least for someone like me or those like me who has no coding knowledge outside of some CSS). Getting accurate information about what to do when you are stuck is amazingly difficult.

The strangest thing to me is that this migration is being forced on everyone (because J1.5.26 is at end of life) before there is a really clear or relatively simple pathway for a migration that doesn't involve so many issues and difficult choices. The reasoning behind this eludes me.

So with that ... on to the continuing migration story (and if this is not appropriate for the Kunena forum because some of these issues are Joomla issues, just let me know and I'll delete this).

First ... there are two good documents about using jUpgrade that are well worth reading first. I'm sure that these are well known and most people have read them but just in case anyone hasn't seen both of them ...

One is the redWIKI here by the developers of jUpgrade.

The other is the Joomla docs from Joomla.

After reading everything and making sure I was as "prepared" as I could be (with all components as up to date as possible, a detailed plan in place about what I would need to do and replace that had no 2.5 compatible version available, a "focus" about what was most important to me if there were any tough decisions to make, and all the other requirements met) I was ready to begin the migration. With a few minor glitches that were easy to correct everything went smoothly (with both jUpgrade and SP Upgrade) for the "basic" migration to the limits of their capabilities but then the real "after migration" work begins of finding out either what went wrong, what else needs to be done, or what needs to be fixed. In some ways this can seem more difficult than initially building the site.

Issues encountered after the migration with an emphasis on issues that directly or indirectly affect Kunena so far have been ...

1. The first issue was that there was no Main Menu because I chose to keep the old menu positions to make it easier to update my site template when that part of the project becomes the priority. This means that the Main Menu was using a "menu" position that doesn't exist in the Beez20 template which is the default. It creates a duplicate Main Menu in this case though that is unpublished.

FIX: Publish the duplicate menu and either leave it in the default position (position 7) or put it in any position you want (I put it in position 12 to put it on top for now and unpublished the login module to leave the forum at full width with nothing in the left position).

2.The next issue is that when you click on the home page it went to HTTPS which is not so good if you don't have SSL on your site. This means that when you click on "home" you get an SSL error message.

FIX: Go to menus and click on Main Menu and the Home item. Click on Metadata on the right hand side and the secure setting is listed as "on" for some reason. Change it to "ignore" (like the other menu items) and the main page will be accessible. I have no idea why this happened (at least to me) on just the home menu link and there is very little information available about what to do about it or that deal with the real cause. Most of the information that comes up with searches about this has nothing to do with the real problem and is mostly about sites that actually have SSL enabled with issues.

3. The Kunena forum link on the Main Menu brings up a "category not found" 404 error. This seems to me to be connected somehow to the change in Section/Categories to just nested Categories and it certainly affects some URL's. The Kunena forum menu link now has a /category section in the SEF URL.

FIX: I renamed htaccess.txt to .htaccess (which needs to be done anyway for SEF URL's) but this did nothing to solve the issue. I then unchecked the SEF settings in the Global Configurations and the forum link in the main menu now worked. The unfortunate part about this is that the URL's were now the non SEF friendly versions (which would break all the backlinks and internal links) and it seems that any attempt to make them SEF friendly breaks the Kunena forum link in the Main Menu. I Finally decided to do a trash and rebuild of the forum menu and this allowed me to use all the SEF features without the "category" part of the URL showing up. I haven't thought through why the original Kunena main menu link created a different URL than the rebuilt one. A side effect of this that I discovered with SEF on is that all the menu links now have a number added after their alias which now shows up in the site SEF URL's so I think I will need to manually change all of the menu aliases to eliminate these so that external and internal links will work. Small price to pay if all the other issues are solvable.

As a side note ... SP Upgrade didn't add anything to any of the URL's and once Kunena was installed and the new forum link on the main menu was activated ... SEF worked fine from the outset. SP Upgrade is much "cleaner" for the main site migration but it has other issues ... including not being able to transfer many of the supported extensions that jUpgrade will and the Kunena forum posts (although the users came across fine). It also has another issue that (at least for me) once the admin session that is active when you do the migration times out ... you can't log in again because it now goes to an SSL link (no fix for this one yet so this means that any further changes to the SP Upgrade backend require starting all over again and them re-doing everything while keeping the session active).

4. Once I trashed and rebuilt the Kunena menu, the facebook like module that I had in the kunena_profilebox menu position disappeared. I went to the module and discovered that tinymce doesn't allow iframes in the new default settings. This problem appears when you open up the facebook link module and tinymce strips out the "restricted" code.

FIX: First make sure that the facebook like module is added to the new Kunena menu items. Next, you need to remove the iframe restriction with tinymce. Next if the code has been stripped out because the module has been opened, replace the code using the code from the 1.5 module version. The likebox should now be back again.

That's where I am for now but I will add the things that come up as they happen. At least I have one option with a working Kunena forum with all the members and posts intact (with jUpgrade) and another one where all my SEF menu links are working with no numbers added but I have a forum with no posts (with SP Upgrade). It seems to be a choice between fixing all the strange links or findingout how to transfer the Kunena database with an export/import procedure. Still lots to check and lots do it seems and much of the real work is probably yet to be done.

A question for those that have more knowledge than I do ... why would the migration process add those numbers to the menu item aliases? Is there a logical reason behind this or is it just some kind of bug that has to be manually removed for every menu item?

One step at a time ...

Thanks for the feedback and progress report, mate.

Most of these issues that you have mentioned are outside the scope of Kunena (although they're interrelated) and wall within the province of Joomla. The menus in Kunena are Joomla menus (nothing terribly surprising about that fact) but there are significant differences in the way that Joomla menus are handled between J! 1.5 and the versions of Joomla that succeeded it. I think that the narrative you have provided gives others a good insight as to why it's necessary to "trash-burn-build" your existing menus and start again (for others reading this topic, please search for the term "trash-burn-build" so that you understand what we're talking about).

There are differences in the way that SEF URLs are routed between J! 1.5 and J! 2.5, too. It is unsurprising that people may have to perform some tweaking around the edges as a post-migration exercise in respect of .htaccess files. Nonetheless, the issue of use SEO itself is explained in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

I don't completely understand how HTTPS is involved in the case because, again, this is a Joomla matter (or may be something related to the behaviour of SP Upgrade - I don't know) and setting up your site to use secure HTTP Is, again, outside the purview of Kunena. Kunena will work with HTTP or HTTPS as long as your site is configured to handle these things. Further, the issue of how people login to your site is discussed in How do I register new users to my website and where should they login to use my website?

I've pointed the development team to look at this discussion and I hope that someone more insightful than me will be about to respond. At the moment, most of the development team are busy enjoying (or recovering from) the activities at JAB12.

Thanks for your update. I wasn't able to reply you before as most of our team was in JAB.

The good news is that it looks like that others in Joomlasphere have noticed the same and for example in the past few weeks Elin has helped to locate and fix a few issues in JUpgrade. The next version will work in a bit different way, which helps users to solve a few problems they've had earlier.

Another news is that there's now initiative to get J1.5 migration component part of Joomla itself. They will also demand/force extension developers to create plug-ins for it, as currently none of the solutions support 99% of the extensions out there. We also found another missing part, which is how to migrate highly customized templates easier to Joomla 2.5+, which is a huge issue for those who provide sites for small companies.

In the mean time, if moving users has been solved, Kunena is fairly easy to move into Joomla! 2.5. I've already written about it but here it is in short:

* copy /media/kunena and make sure that file permissions are OK
* copy all xxx_kunena tables
* install Kunena
* change all category permissions (user groups and access levels have changed)

That's it.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I migrated to J2.5 using SPupgrade. All my kunena tables appear to be ok in the new database. I installed 1.7.2 in J2.5. Since I had 1.7.2 on my Joomla 1.5 site, I thought my posts and tables would show after migration, but it appears to have been treated like a clean installation. I acknowledge not doing enough research before migrating. Am I stuck now? Or, is there are way I can keep my categories and posts?

SPUpgrade doesn't import anything else than plain Joomla. Everything else you need to do by hand -- or use JUpgrade instead, which imports Kunena.