Question Update Kunena DB for new discussions during Joomla 2.5 migration

I am slowly building / migrating my j1.5 site (which is live) to j2.5 (which is in progress). I know how to successfully install K2.0.2 and migrate all of the files from j1.5 to j2.5.

In a perfect world, I'd like to be able to do this early on, and then when I'm ready for my J2.5 site to go live, I could "re-import" my Kunena data to the J2.5 site without the reconfiguration process involved in a complete migration and re-installation. I.E. I'd like to be able to just move over tables involved with new discussion posts and new replies. I suspect there are more issues than meet the eye, and you'll tell me to just re-migrate the whole thing. But I thought I'd ask.

This is a huge topic for discussion and I could probably write a small book. In the past 4 years we must have had over 100 topics relating to "what is the best way to move my working forum from one site to another site."

It is not easy, in a forum context, to provide a one-size-fits-all-guaranteed-to-work-every-time answer.

A lot of people (and you, kross76, I know are not among them) think that Joomla and Kunena are a few mouse-clicks and, hey presto, instant website. We know that's not how things work. Joomla is serious webcraft. Sure, a few mouseclicks and you've built a functioning website; adding Kunena is a piece of cake, too. But when we start talking about moving things around or changing the way that things behave because we do not like what we've got (or because the people who wrote the software we're using will soon be removing support for that software) that's when things start to get complicated. You could compare this to using Windows XP and you want to now move to Windows 8 but you still want to keep everything that you had under Windows XP. You begin to get the idea that these kinds of things need a bit more technical understanding than which button to press to do things for your automatically.

So this is a good question that you've asked. By searching this forum you will find that many other people have asked this question, too. It's a question that I would probably spend about a week (or more) thinking about if I was in your situation. Indeed, I have a few J! 1.5 websites that use Kunena and I would like to upgrade them ... when I have the time.

When we moved this website from J! 1.5 to J! 2.5 this was an activity that began nearly 2 years ago. It was only because several of us got together, planned the activity, tested our proof-of-concept using a test website, tested the forum migration strategy using a test website and then we down this site (for about 4 hours), moved the J! 2.5 that we'd already created to replace the old site and performed the whole forum migration again that we eventually finished the job with minimal impact to the thousands of people who visit this site every day.

Any web-based discussion forum consists of three main parts:

(1) The users
(2) The forum data
(3) Uploaded/attached files

It's not just a case of moving the Kunena tables from one site to another.

Just as you are doing now, developing a proof-of-concept, you will hit the point when you need to cut-over and, at that point, again do a lot of what you've already done so that you do not lose any important data. I don't know if what I have written is helpful, but those are the issues that I think you need to think about.

And, lastly ... good luck. I hope it all works for you.

A very thorough and thoughtful response - thanks. Your last paragraph says it all, and that's what I suspected. I've documented the step by step process I need to do to migrate Kunena, so its doable. For other readers, CBJuice2 works great to migrate incremental registered users including their hashed passwords, and J2XML seems to work fine for articles.