Compass Designs

As promised in my last blog post, I am going to be doing a series of tutorials about migrating your Joomla site from 1.0.X to 1.5 stable. The site I will be migrating is this one, compassdesigns.net, currently running on 1.0.X!

I'll be building the new site alongside this one, so you'll be able to see the migration unfold in all its gory details!

Downloading Joomla 1.5 Stable

The first thing we need to do is grab the files. We head over to joomlacode.org and go into the Joomla project (or you can just use the link on the home page of the joomla.org site.

You get the current 1.5 stable files from:

joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=2

Just click on the file type you want and download it to your computer.

If joomlacode.org is down, you can get the package from Phil Taylor's website at mirror.phil-taylor.com. 

Uploading Joomla 1.5 Stable

The next step is to upload the compressed file to your hosting account. I have just created a new account at makeajoomlablog.com.

I then log into the host management tool, in this case cpanel. Here is am going to simply use cpanel's own built in file manager to do my uploading.

In the file manager I can just browse to public_html and upload the compressed file I just downloaded.

This places the compressed file in the main directory of the hosting account I have.

Note that its best to upload and then extract, rather than the other way around. If you upload all the files individually, the "file/folder ownership" will not be correct. We want apache or "nobody" to own them, not the FTP account we use. This ownership/permissions problem can lead to future problems.

The other potential problem is a single file might get corrupted during what would be a long upload, and cause problems.

Extracting the Joomla Files

After the files are uploaded, I can use cpanel's filemanager to extract them on the server. 

Just click on the compressed file and then on the extract link.

This extracts all the files in the compressed archive. Then we can delete the zip file we uploaded, its just taking up space.

In the next step, we will create the SQL database and install Joomla through the web browser.

See this tutorial as a video screencast