Perspectance

I’m in the middle of moving a client’s Joomla website to a new host. The project reminds me of Gary Stager’s learning adventure assignments in my masters program. Professor Stager would assign one new application project each week or so, like “create a composition using Notepad Finale and share it with your learning circle.” If you didn’t know the first thing about music theory or notation, well, that just added a layer of complexity to learning a new technical application. It was hard to fail when the goal was to construct learning. As a result, I grew in my confidence to tackle new technologies using the abundant resources available among others who know a little more. Partly as a result, I work in the technical arena if the client can spare the extra time it will take me to figure out how to get the job done. Read on only if you are interested in the chronicle of moving a Joomla site to a new server.

I chose Siteground to host the client’s site because of their reputation around Joomla hosting and because their live chat sales staff endured three long conversations reassuring me of their suitability. I learned to manage my own Wordpress and Dreamweaver sites with the cPanel last year and Fastastico made things really simple. Both products come with Joomla hosting on Siteground. So here I was ready to go for the client.

Although Siteground offers to install Joomla 1.5 through a request ticket, I read the tutorials to do it myself since we were moving a site, not just doing a fresh install. The Siteground fine print says we only have 7 days to request a website transfer, and BTW, the site was mysteriously not working from the old host at last check, as in, getting #2 database connection error page instead of any nice front page. Also BTW, the old host -which will not be named, didn’t employ the familiar cPanel, but instead their own abbreviated facsimile, AND access to MyPHP admin was not working with the usual credentials. All these factors suddenly preclude A) requesting the new host to do an install, and B) using Fantastico to do it myself. I am needing to move down the tutorial page to read how to do a ‘manual install’. Oh, and the old site had been built in version 1.0, which after some study sounds like it will involve a step called ‘upgrading’. I am needing to move down the tutorial page to read how to do a ‘manual install’.

Luckily, FTP access to the old site works and I was able to backup the Joomla frontend folder to my laptop. And fortunately, after several days of calls and emails to the old host admin, he sent me a zipped .sql file and new credentials to access the old database. I see the database has tables in it from not only Joomla, but every rendition of previous websites and catalogs. Wondering how this will complicate an import. (Can I just delete the tables we won’t be needing anymore before I move the database, like I’ve done before in Access?).

Back to the installation tutorials, I read the first step:

1. create a MySQL database and a user with all necessary privileges to access the database. OK, I’ve done this twice before for brand new installations, and there’s even a tutorial for this, but what was the old database called exactly, and where would I find that, hmm, maybe in a Joomla config file?…..Yep, there it is in the configuration.php, but the next line of it says the dbprefix=’jos_’ , so wonder if I name a new database with or without that prefix..
• Guess I will go read THAT tutorial…….(5mins later)…Why do I need to create this database and user when I have it sitting zipped up on my laptop? It says a host domain name prefix is going to be automatically added to the name of the database for me. I don’t think that is going to work! And, the user I see named in the old config file is the same as the domain name. All this same name stuff is confusing. Sigh…What happened to the idea of importing a database?
• I suddenly realize I am reading an installation tutorial that makes no mention of MOVING a Joomla site to a new server. I’ll go research and see if Siteground has a different tutorial for that. Maybe I should just do a Fantastico install of a 1.5 Joomla shell in a different directory so I can see what it should sort’ve eventually look like.
• A Siteground search reveals no ‘How to move’ tutorials, so I am really on my own here. So I go ahead and create a new database, an admin user for it, associate the two, and then import the database .sql file that the old webhost guy emailed to me. I was worried how it would get unzipped, but in downloading it to my Mac, it looked unzipped. Once uploaded, I selected all the extraneous files that did not have the jos_prefix and dropped them from the structure by checking the boxes and choosing Drop from the menu at the bottom.
• Next, I try a Fantastico install of Joomla 1.0xx into a play directory I won’t really use, just to see how it’s all supposed to look. Hmm..this all looks like the Joomla frontend folder structure I have saved on my laptop from the old server. I feel confident to create a new directory for the frontend Joomla files using File Mgr in the cPanel and upload the ones we have saved from the old server on laptop. But it will take too long to upload individually, so now I make a new site in Dreamweaver (w/ the credentials for our new host) to FTP the saved frontend files up to the public_html directory of the new server. The popup message says all the files except two language files were successfully moved. Hope those were not necessary.
• Now I know, because I Googled this task, that I have to change a few lines in the configuration.php file to match my new database. This article was helpful.
• Time to try it out…..Sigh, of course I get an error, but it’s just one error! Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/includes/version.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php52/pear’) in /home/*****/public_html/joomla/includes/joomla.php on line 71
• I Googled this for an hour and found nothing helpful until this 5 step howto by redlens, which looks promising, but since it’s after midnight, will try in the morning.
2. Siteground’s tutorial says step 2 is to upload the Joomla installation files. I didn’t see why I would need those if the files are all there, and other articles hadn’t mentioned it, but it sort’ve jives with that hopeful article I found last night.
• But to do that, I first have to download the Joomla package from the Joomla site to my laptop. Hope I am guessing which version I need. It was not the most recent one, and I couldn’t find an obvious version indicator in any of the config files. Extract the files…well they look extracted to me when I dragged them over to the FTP site. Now upload the installation files to the new web server. Huh, am I to assume that is just the folder marked installation? What about the file right next to it called install.php? And should I go login to cPanel first and make a directory for these to go up into on public_html? Maybe I can just ‘put’ the folder up there. Wait, reading carefully, it says upload ‘the’ files to the webhost, and it doesn’t say anything about making a directory first.
• That joomla forum article was the most helpful so far. It required me to start over doing most of the same steps I had already done, with the different ‘dump’ process instead of export buttons. By now, I had at least three databases I was playing with because I wanted to start clean with the instructions each time. I really got worried getting down to the last step to read, “Make sure that the MySQL version is the same for both websites — people have had trouble importing SQL dumps because they’re using different versions.” I couldn’t find what version each server was using. Is it the same as the PHP version? Or the MyPHP? Or the Ubuntu server so clearly identified? Sheesh, I don’t care. Again, just hope for the best.
• Finally, I get a set of Joomla pre-install pages all looking green for go, clicking next, next, next, and then it gives me a new admin password, OK, then View Site and, OH JOY! the long MIA Joomla-based client site comes up. Yippee yo kay ay!
3. Always troubleshooting: But when I type the new admin credentials at the URL www.****.org/Joomla_1/administrator, I’m screwed with an Incorrect password, User or Access level message. I tried the domain admin and all of the users and passwords I’d manually created and associated with this database, still no access.
• Back to searching the Joomla forums and Google for another half hour, and I find some new help from humvee Andy Wallace, for how to reset the admin password.
• Scrolling down, James Ramsey seemed happy, and he even made a video to show the steps – which were slightly different in one crucial area BTW, so I used his advice first, and it worked!
4. Upgrade to the latest stable version, 1.5. It’s midnight again, and I think this will be another task for another day.