Solution to several problems upgrading Joomla!

Here is a brief rundown of some of the problems and solutions I came across while upgrading a site from Joomla! 1.0 to 1.5. I’m going to focus on a few issues that are directly related to the installation and use of the migrator.

Before you even think about reading this you should familiarize yourself with the primary migration document.

Issue 1

The problem

The latest migrator release wouldn’t upload to my site. I tried this throught the Joomla! 1.o admin uploader numerous times. With every attempt the had to manually remove the files from my server (the physical upload worked – it just showed as failing in admin).

The solution

As a last ditch attempt I tried to upload the first stable release of the migrator (I was trying to upload the latest – 1.4). It worked perfectly!

Issue 2

The problem

After I ran the migration script I couldn’t download the MySQL database dump. The download button simply didn’t work in Safari and in Firefox it downloaded an empty file.

The solution

I figured that the dump had to be on my server somewhere and went hunting for it. Here is where it was for me…

/public_html/administrator/components/com_migrator/dumps

Issue 3

The problem

I actually had a few issues after I ran the Joomla! 1.5 installer but the most persistent had to do with the front page. For some reason it used the default Joomla! template while the rest of the site used the new template I had uploaded and chosen in the template manager.

The solution

Almost at my wits end I decided to have a look at the database. I went into my cpanel’s phpMyAdmin and navigated to my database. Under ‘jos_templates_menu’ I noticed that there was an entry for the default template. Deleting it gave me control over my Joomla! front page again!

I hope these humble tips may help you in some way. The upgrade process took me about 3 full days of rouble shooting. In all fairness, I was also switching hosts to BlueHost at the time and that may have caused some of the issue.

Please feel free to leave your comments or questions below. If this tutorial did help you in any way, why not give devDisko a quick linkback?!