RO CSVI comes with a set of migration templates that can be used to migrate your Joomla 3 data to a Joomla 4 site, not only that, this can also be used to move data from a Joomla 4 to another Joomla 4 site. The aim of the migration templates is that you can move your data with a few clicks.
With Joomla 4 getting stable and popular in the Joomla market, users are looking at migrating their Joomla data from a Joomla 3 site to a Joomla 4 site with ease. In RO CSVI we have made standard migration templates to make this process as easy as possible. This document explains on how to use these migration templates to move data from a Joomla 3 site to a Joomla 4 site. The same migration templates can be used to move data from a Joomla version to another and not just a Joomla 3 version to a Joomla 4 version.
Migration templates are available for the following Joomla extensions
- Joomla Categories
- Joomla Contact
- Joomla Content
- Joomla Custom Fields
- Joomla Menus
- Joomla Modules
- Joomla Tags
- Joomla Users
Keeping the database ID
The migration templates have been made with the idea that you want to keep your database IDs the same. This is a big help in maintaining the relations between different parts of your website. Think about the menu items linking to articles or categories, they are connected by the database ID of the given category or article. Modules are linked to menu items by their ID, users are linked to articles by their ID. The list goes on and on. To prevent that you have to manually change all these settings, which would defeat the purpose of the migration, we have added the option to keep the existing IDs, this option is enabled on all migration templates.
One thing you really need to be aware of is that the website where you import the data does not have any of the existing IDs from the old site. If you do have them, they will be overwritten and things can look quite unexpected. So check if you do not have any overlapping IDs between your source site, where the data is exported from, and your target site, where the date is imported into. If you have any overlapping IDs, you have to decide whether you run the migration into a clean site or cleanup the site so there are no overlapping IDs anymore.
Multilingual sites
If you have a multilingual site, make sure all languages that are going to be used are installed prior to running your migrations. The language are required to be available during import.
Associations
The migration supports associations as used in multilingual sites as well. All migration templates have the associations enabled by default, so no changes are needed. If you do not use associations in your site, you can just ignore them. The export will be empty and so the import will not import anything.
Installation of Migration Templates
First step is to install the migration templates in RO CSVI. This process has to be done in both Joomla 3 and in Joomla 4. So make sure RO CSVI package is installed in both of the Joomla versions.
To Install migration templates follow the steps
- Go to RO CSVI maintenance page
- Select RO CSVI in the first dropdown list
- Select Install example templates in second drop down list.
- Select the needed Joomla extensions, for example to migrate articles select Joomla Content in the list of extensions. Set Enable debug log option to Yes.
- Click on Continue button
- Example and migration templates for selected Joomla extensions are now installed.
Kindly note that steps for installing migration templates are same in both Joomla 3 and Joomla 4 versions.