Wanted to take an existing Joomla 2.5.19, update template, and then bring in the new content that is being created as I am updating the site overall. They were using JEvents heavily and made weekly posts to the site. Here are the overall steps I took.
- Make an Akeeba backup and downloaded it.
- Created a place to restore the site in my local WAMP.
- Upgraded the site to Joomla 3.X. First I had to go from 2.5.19 and update to 2.5.28 (3.9 meg download). This was straight forward through the backend. In the Joomla! update screen change the options to “short term support”, and “save and close”. You will now have the option to upgrade to 3.5.1 (9.7 meg download).
- Update components. I had the JCE, Akeeba, JEvents, Sourcer, and a few others. Only the JCE needed an update after the 3.5.1 upgrade. I was able to upgrade the Joomla! core to 3.6.5 and then 3.9.3 (11.7 meg download). The front end of the site was still working almost perfectly.
- Build the new template on the local copy.
- Make a backup of this site and restore it in another directory. I needed to do this because I added a few pages and changed the format on others.
- Download the old site again, install it locally in another directory and upgrade it to 3.x again.
- Export the assets table, content, and in my case JEvents.
- Import the these tables into your upgraded site.
- You should be very close at this point. This is where I used the restored version of the first site I upgraded and made the new template.
The tables I had to export were the following:
- j25_assets
- j25_content – j25_content_types ( _content_types are not in Joomla 3.X )
- prefix_content – prefix_content_rating
Since this site was using JEvents I exported all the “_jevent_” tables, deleted those tables from fully upgraded new template site’s database, and imported the exported tables.
I hope this helps someone else out there.
