How to Upgrade from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3

January 06, 2013 | Joomla Tutorials | Written by Nick Savov

In this tutorial we're going show you how to update from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.

Three things to note before we begin:

Joomla 2.5 is the Long Term Support version and offers a stable platform for most sites.
This update is currently recommended only for relatively simple sites.
A more sophisticated update process is expected to be available for Joomla 3.1 early this year. Look for more details on that later this week.

However, for people who do want to use Joomla 3, the update process from Joomla 2.5 to 3 does work and in this tutorial, we're going to show you how to use it.

1) Create a backup

Make sure you create a full backup of your site. You can use our How to Backup a Joomla 2.5 Site tutorial if you need help with creating a backup.

2) Make sure everything is up-to-date

Go to Exetensions > Extension Manager
Make sure that all your extensions are up-to-date
Make sure you're running the latest version of Joomla 2.5. At the time of this writing, it's Joomla 2.5.8.

3) Check your system for Joomla 3 compatibility

At the time of this writing, Joomla does not have a pre-upgrade check yet, however it's an upcoming feature that will be added soon. Until then, you must check things manually.

Go to Site, then System Information.
Check all your settings from within this tab and compare them to the required/recommended settings at http://www.joomla.org/technical-requirements.html
If your site meets all the requirements, you are ready to update.

4) Check your extensions for Joomla 3 compatibility

There will also be a custom extension check in the new pre-upgrade check; However, until then, you need to check with your extension developers' sites, documentation, and/or support as to whether the extensions are Joomla 3 compatible. This step includes your template(s) as well.

5) Create a test site

Once you're sure that all your extensions are compatible, create another backup and a test site on the same server in a subfolder (be sure to create a copy of the database and not use the same one). You can use our Create a Joomla Test Site Using Akeeba Backup tutorial for that part.

6) Test the upgrade in the test site

Go to Components, then Joomla! Update
Click the Options button

Change the Update Server to Short Term Support
Click Save & Close

Finally, on the test site, click the "Install the update". If all goes well, then you can do the same steps on the live site.

Note: if the "Install the update" doesn't appear right away, you may need to go to Extensions (top menu) >> Extension Manager (sub menu) >> Update (tab) >> Purge Cache (button - far right).
Note: after upgrading, check in Extensions (top menu) >> Extension Manager (sub menu) >> Database (side menu) and make sure there are no errors. If there are some, click on fix button.

Enjoy your new Joomla 3 site!

Comments

#1 Paul1342 2013-01-09 07:13

Hi
When I upgrade in this way I end up with 2 htaccess files - the first .htaccess because I changed for SEF on the site then the new htaccess.txt file from the upgrade. Does one take preference over the other; should I delete one of them?
Thanks

#2 steve 2013-01-09 14:15

Hi Paul,

You can happily ignore that new htaccess.txt file. It won't impact your site in any way, unless you change its name to .htaccess.

#3 roy 2013-03-07 16:49

Hi,
I tried to update a few times like this, but on one site the frontend is blank..
I use
Hikashop
chronoforms
falang
sh404sef
akeeba
and xmap.

Could it be one of these components? i checked for Joomla3 compatibility.

Thanks, Roy

#4 Rich 2013-03-14 14:50

I've tried this as well on a test site and now I get a white screen. Error reporting gives me this:

Error: The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must to be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.
Source File:

www.hopechurchnottingham.org/. ../

Any idea how I could fix this?

Thanks

#5 Erica 2013-03-20 18:44

Thanks so much!!!

#6 mark33sv 2013-05-15 04:24

Hi, I've update J!2.5.8 to 3.0
I fix Magic Quotes = Off ::
.htaccess,
configuration.p hp changed mysqli to mysql
user and password ok.
I just acan see error:0 now...
BD on my website is ok.

What can ido in this case to fix my website?

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