Migration roadmap, from J!1.5 to J!2.5

Pheno wrote: ...
If I upgrade my J1.5 site to J2.5 and then install Flexicontent 2.0, should all the categories automatically work in the J2.5 version?
Or is it a mandatory requirement to also use FLEXImigrate?

I have done the upgrade, but my category hierarchy has been lost: all categories are just children of the base category.

Simply upgrading/migrating Joomla will not migrate the FLEXIcontent category structure.
On J1.5 FLEXIcontent used one base section for all the categories.
On Joomla 2.5 since it now has only categories that section becomes a category and all the other categories are in that one category.
All the multi-category structure is lost that way.

Unfortunately I have found FLEXImigrate to be unreliable.
The two websites I tested it on both failed.
It appears development of FLEXImigrate has stopped as there have not been any updates for quite awhile.

FLEXIcontent 2.0 stable has just been released (yesterday).
Give that a few days to settle a bit as there will be issues.
It will take some time and effort to address those issues.

Previously it was planned to look at the migration issue after the stable release of the J2.5 version.
Now more users will be looking to migrate.

So I will discuss this with ggppdk the Lead Developer.
My opinion is that migration should be included with FLEXIcontent.
FLEXIcontent should not follow the Joomla migration bad example.
It is just stupid that to migrate Joomla properly users have to use a 3rd-party tool (which has had numerous issues), or buy a commercial product.

What tool did you use for migrating J2.5 to J2.5?
It may be possible to create a working plug-in for JUpgrade.
The current JUpgrade plug-in for FLEXIcontent does not work at all (don't know why they include it).
SP Upgrade (which works great) also accepts plug-ins, but it is commercial.
Maybe that would be a good option if it created a migration path that worked properly.
But either a new method/tool or fixing the issues in FLEXImigrate may be a better solution.

The easier and quicker it is to migrate the sooner we only have one version to develop and maintain.


So to answer your question ...
Right now your only option is to try using FLEXImigrate.
Apparently for some users it works.

Beyond that you will need to allow some time to address the migration issue now that FC 2.0 is released.

.

i think fleximigrate dev waiting for stable releases and after they update it. .. je patient lol

kenmcd, thanks very much for your detailed reply - it is much appreciated!

Your experience of Netasspro's Fleximigrate is similar to mine. It seems to fail quite often, and even when it works it changes all the category IDs, which breaks the menu system as well as (I think) links within items.

For the J1.5 to J2.5 upgrades, I have used both JUpgrade (Free extension) and SP Upgrade (Paid extension). Both seem OK, although I preferred SP Upgrade because it allows you to migrate *to* a fresh J2.5 site, rather than from within the old J1.5 site. That said, I think I read that JUpgrade is changing to adopt a similar process.

I think I will just have to wait until a more stable upgrade path is available.

Pheno wrote: ...
Your experience of Netasspro's Fleximigrate is similar to mine.
It seems to fail quite often, and even when it works it changes all the category IDs,
which breaks the menu system as well as (I think) links within items.
...

The changing menu ID and category ID issue stems from J2.5 itself.
They used certain lower IDs and some blocks of IDs.
This forces any migration tool to work around those IDs which are not available.
And if those IDs were in use in J1.5 – the migration tool must assign new IDs.
This changes all the IDs.
SP Upgrade moves some of these pre-assigned lower IDs to make room for the original IDs so the article and category IDs, and menu link IDs to not change (same URLs).
I think JUpgrade now also has this option, but I have not tested it in so long.

Removing sections also forces the issue – what category ID do you assign to any previous sections now that they are all categories?
If categories keep all their original IDs and some of these are the same as the sections IDs, then something has to give.

Menu items point to a particular ID, so if that ID changes the menu item breaks.
The migration tools can try to keep track for some of these and fix them.
Sections are gone, so all those menu items break.
The menu item type has to change and the ID has to change.
It is a complicated mess.

The root "category" in FLEXIcontent 1.5.x is a J1.5 section.
So your root category in FC 2.0 is now a category with a new ID (most likely).
Think about how that affects everything.
:shock:

FLEXIcontent links all the extended data (user fields) to the com_content article or category.
If those article IDs change then all the database connections to the extended data is lost.
This is what the current JUpgrade plugin for FLEXIcontent does.
All the article IDs change but nothing is done to maintain the connection to the FC extended data.
That creates an un-fixable mess.

This is why something like FLEXImigrate is required.
The tool must know how to maintain the FC relationships with com_content.

Any J1.5 to J2.5 migration is going to involve some manual fixing.
Hopefully we can help make that as painless as possible.

.

Yes, what a nightmare

I guess there might be a solution to the clashing category ID problem along the lines of adding a large number, like 10 000, to all the category IDs, and doing the same for references in menus and within articles.
I'm sure there's probably good reasons why this wouldn't work

I must admit, I never even thought about Secions. I never used them in J1.5 (I just used a CCK extension if I had complex category structure!)

I was wondering if there had been any more developments on the upgrade path from J1.5 to J2.5, or if any changes are likely in future?