I recently decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my site from Mambo 4.5.2 to the latest release of Joomla. I had been putting it off since frankly, it is a lot of effort to go through and from the front end the site looks no different!

But I wanted to install some new components and besides, I had decided to throw in my weight behind Joomla so I went through the pain.

Click on 'Read more' below to read the full upgrade story:

Here are some guidelines if you ever want to upgrade. These guidelines can also roughly be used if you just want to move your Joomla installation from one server to another.

There are lots of threads on this topic on the Joomla site as well and believe me, I trawled them all. The main guidelines that you want to read are the following:

http://help.joomla.org/content/view/818/132/

This topic gives you a high level overview of upgrading from Mambo 4.5.2 to Joomla 1.0.X. Please note that this assumes that you are upgrading from Mambo 4.5.2 - this is relatively straightforward. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Mambo, you might find this thread of use - written by Phil Taylor and posted both on his blog as well as in the Joomla Forum:

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,36395.0.html

In my case, I went from Mambo 4.5.2 to Joomla 1.0.9

In general:

The databases are not different at the moment, so your upgrade really consists of

1. Installing the new code (Joomla .php files)
2. Ensuring that the code for your installed modules and components are also copied to your Joomla installation.

If you have Cpanel and Fantastico installed on your hosting service you may be tempted to make use of the upgrade path offered by the Fantastico installer.

Do not do this! 

This will install the latest version of Joomla over your Mambo installation and you will not loose your content, however, your third party components and modules will be gone. This can potentially be a disaster, as you can imagine. It is much better to follow the manual route, even though it is more time consuming.

I am therefore going to follow the general steps as laid out by the help guide on Joomla.org but add a couple of other tips to make the going a bit easier.

Step 1:  Copy all your Joomla files to a new directory on your server

Here is a good way to copy all your Joomla files to your server. If you have Cpanel available, make use of the File Manager in CPanel. First copy the .zip file containing all your Joomla files to your selected directory on your server using your normal FTP program, then use your CPanel file manager to very quickly unzip this file. If you do it this way it goes very quickly and all your files will be in the right formats. Why is this important? Sometimes when you copy files through your normal FTP program you might mess up the file formats because normal text files must be transferred using ASCII format and all executable files (especially those used by your WYSIWYG editors) must be transferred in Binary format. Now, some FTP programs automatically decide the format and it is not a problem, however, if you do it this way you know that the formats are correct.

Step 2: Make sure all your directories have the correct file permissions

Some of your directories might or might not have the correct file permissions. A quick and easy way to check is to run the first step of the Joomla installer. You will find this in the Installation folder of your new Joomla folder. The first step in the installation process will tell you which file permissions are not correct. Correct the file permissions through your CHMOD function in your FTP program or your file manager in your CPanel. Make a list of all the directories that should be writable! You might use this later again to check, AFTER you have moved your Joomla files over permanently to the root. Then DELETE the installations folder. You should NOT go ahead and install Joomla through this Installations folder, it will overwrite your database.

Step 3: Copy all your third party component and module files across from your Mambo directory.

Please note that you should only copy the files belonging to those components and module across to your Joomla folder - DON'T try to reinstall the components, you will overwrite your content of any installed components or modules. Don't overwrite the standard components and modules - you can find a list of these on the Joomla site, in the link provided right above.

Step 4: Update your Configuration.php file in your Joomla directory.

The configuration file that comes with the new Joomla installation will be called configuration.php-dist 

Update the following settings:

Save the file and rename it to configuration.php 

Run the SQL script that is included with the Joomla files in your current MySQL database using PHPMyAdmin.

/installation/sql/migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql

Step 5: Test your site.

Go to the Joomla directory and run your site from there. Everything should work! Please note, you might have some problems with your Admin panel and your WYSIWYG editor - I have some special notes about that below.

Also, if you are using SEF or any of the third party SEF components you must remember to change your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess. My suggestion is really that you should test your site without SEF and without the third party SEF components first. When I did my upgrade I only switched on the SEF components when everything was copied over and Joomla up and running. You stand the risk of getting false negatives if there are settings in your htaccess file that are not correct (in other words, you might think that you have a problem with your Joomla installation and in the mean time it is the SEF setting that is not working) If you really want to test your SEF in your Joomla installation, remember to change the RewriteBase / in your .htaccess file in your Joomla directory to reflect the Joomla directory path.

Step 6: Make the transition

Once you are happy that Joomla is running, you now need to to move your Joomla files to your current Mambo directory. This could very well be the root of your server (in other words, most Mambo/Joomla installations are made in the root so that you access the site by just typing in http://www.your-site.com/.) The problem now is to make this a smooth transition.

I suggest that you backup your Mambo files into a subdirectory on your server. Create a directory therefore called 'old-mambo' or something like that and copy (or move) all your Mambo files into this directory. Of course, to be very safe, you should also make a copy of all these files onto your local hard disk (and should do this BEFORE you start moving your files around!)

Once your files have all been moved into the 'old-mambo' directory, you should move the files from the Joomla directory into your root. Once again, this can be quite tricky depending on which FTP program you use. I suggest you 'play around' first on another non-critical setup to practice. Essentially you are moving files from a sub-directory into the root.

Step 7: Update your Configuration.php again!

Update the 'live-site' and 'absolute-path' settings in your Configuration.php file again to reflect the fact that you are NOT running from a Joomla directory any more but from the root (if that is where your Mambo was installed originally). Also make sure that the settings to your cache folder is correct.

After your upgrade you might experience problems with your WYSIWYG editor - Problems such as :

When you try to open a popup, for example when you try to insert an image into your content, or a table, you might get this message and the popup will show a blank window:

"tinyMCE object reference not found from pop up"

You might also get this error or something similar:

error tinyMCE has no properties 

I have set up a separate post detailing how to deal with these types of errors - you can read it here:

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