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Important: Joomla has now released Joomla 2.5 version which means that Joomla 1.7.3 will soon NOT be supported any more, final date February 2012 unless otherwise stated. However these instructions still apply and once you have upgraded to Joomla 1.7.3 then use the extension manager in Joomla to upgrade to version Joomla 2.5.

Check out what’s new in Joomla 2.5, they have done a wonderful job with this latest Joomla version

Hello all, it is my pleasure to share with you the successful conversion of my website mbrsolution from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 using jupgrade.

Jupgrade is a great component that will help you convert your website to Joomla 1.7 it also applies to Joomla 1.6 but why would you want to upgrade to Joomla 1.6. Please read the following article Joomla Development Network to know more about Joomla’s life cycle.

There are steps you need to take before you upgrade and after you upgrade Joomla.

The following are the steps that I took to successfully convert my site.

1) Install jupgrade on your website following the instructions found in nirmaltv.com.

2) Start working on your site, which is going to take some tweaking and editing depending on the template you use. My template is not compatible with IE 6, I have tweaked it a bit for IE 6 but I am not really concern as IE 6 is slowly been face out. I have installed an IE plugin to remind the visitor using an older version of IE, which may not display my website correctly. I will work a bit more on the code to get it to work a bit better for IE 6.

3) Make sure that all your plugins, modules and components are compatible with the new version of Joomla. I had to convert the code on one particular module for it to work properly. It took me some research and many hours but I was very happy to finally have it working I have found out the hard way, it is better to delete a module, component or plugin that is not yet compatible with Joomla 1.7 before upgrading. After I converted my website I had some issues trying to delete a file that did not exist or was not compatible with the latest version.

4) The following are my components installed that are compatible with Joomal 1.7 1) Admin Tools, 2) Akeeba Backup, 3) Easybook Reloaded, 4) Fox Contact, 5) JV-linkExchanger, 6) VipPortfolio. Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup are in my opinion 2 components you must installed in your Joomla website. Akeeba Backup is the most easy and extremely useful component to have if you want to create backups.

5) Make sure that all links are working properly. There are many online sites that you can use to help you find those broken links. I have listed one 1) Link Diagnosis, and you can also download this excellent tool for windows 2) Xenu.

6) If you really want to know how well your site is doing check woorank, this tool will show the most common problems with your website and provide a guide to help you fix and repair some of the problems you are having that you might not even be aware. This is very important for better SEO optimization.

7) Make sure that you check and enable the banners that are not active. One of the reasons this occurs is because your previous version was using position left, right, banner etc and the new version comes with position-0, position-1, position-2 etc. Also when you activate your banners, check the type and select custom if you are using a custom code.

Once you are happy with your upgrade then follow the normal procedures to move your Joomla site from one folder to another folder as mentioned in step 1 from nirmaltv.com.

9) Follow the steps carefully as illustrated below:

1. Move all the files and folders from your Joomla folder to the new directory. For example from public_html to public_html/oldjoomlasite

2. Move all the files and folders from jupgrade folder to public_html

3. Your site should be live with the new Joomla 1.7 look. To add more style to my site I changed the template with a Joomla 1.7 version template of the same style as I had with my previous version of Joomla 1.5. You might have to do the same with your template.

If you have any problems, one solution could be to check the following to make sure that the data is entered correctly.

Check your configuration.php file and make sure the following changes are set correctly:

From: var $log_path = ‘/home/user/public_html/jupgrade/logs’;

To: var $log_path = ‘/home/user/public_html/logs’;

From: var $tmp_path = ‘/home/user/public_html/jupgrade/tmp’;

To: var $tmp_path = ‘/home/user/public_html/tmp’;

From: var $ftp_root = ‘/public_html/jupgrade’;

To: var $ftp_root = ‘/public_html’;

From: var $live_site = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/jupgrade’;

To: var $live_site = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’;

You could also remove the content of the cache folder (public_html/cache in this example)

10) Very important, make a backup of both of your sites before you start working on the upgrade and before you move the new version mentioned on step 8, in case something goes wrong.

11) After you have moved the website to the root of your server if that is where you will be installing Joomla, delete the files from oldjoomlasite backup once you are happy with the new version. If anything goes wrong restore the the backup and find out where you weren’t wrong and try again. Remember there is no hurry so take your time and don’t rush.

Hopefully at this point everything is working ok and your site is live. Just keep checking especially on the backend to see if everything is working well. If you have any questions just post them here and I will be glad to help you.

Now that you have upgraded to Joomla 1.7.3 then follow these Joomla instructions to upgrade to Joomla 2.5

Good luck