Today was a nice day to try and update a Joomla 1.7.5 site to Joomla 2.5.1.

An ideal site to start with as it has only a couple of menu items with single pages and besides the JCE editor only one extension, Easyblog, with, really, only one blog-itme.

So what can go wrong, huh? Apart from some hickups, basically nothing and all is running smoothly.

So. Just for my own backlog. How did I do it?

• First of all, the site was joomla 1.7.4, so I updated it (with ftp) to 1.7.5.
• Checked JCE version, yes, was the latest, so okay there.
• Checked Easyblog, was not the latest version, so updated that first, checked the site, and all was still well.
• No trashed items, like I said, this is a very clean, small site.

Alas, backup first, of course. Old fashioned way, download files and create database backup with PhpMyAdmin.

Next, go to the extension manager, to the updater and yep, there it was, waiting, Joomla 2.5.1. Took a breath and selected the package and hit update.

It immediately threw a couple of errors. Displayed nicely in red:

Unknown column 'sitename' in xxxxx_languages' SQL=ALTER TABLE `xxxxx_languages` CHANGE `sitename` `sitename` VARCHAR( 1024 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';
SQL = ALTER TABLE `#__languages` CHANGE `sitename` `sitename` VARCHAR( 1024 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

All right, apparently something with language files. I don't remember if I started this site in English and installed the Dutch language afterwards, or started in Dutch right way. So searching the net a bit, and basically what I found was to go to the database tab in the extension manager and hit "fix". Which was a challenge to find, cause those parts weren't translated 

Fixed it, then, because I figured Joomla hadn't been updated because of those errors, tried the updater again.

When that didn't work, I saw my control panel on the main screen with all vertical icons instead of nicely lined up and checked system info: ah. It did update! I am so on 2.5.1.

So what's with the vertical panel of icons? Apparently, according to posts I found that is a caching problem, so I cleaned my joomla cache, then my browser cache and now all looks good.

Still able to post articles? - yes

Still able to blog? - yes

something weird in the backend? - except for the untranslated strings: no

front looks okay? - yes.

That left me with fixing the language files. Downloaded the newest Dutch language files and installed it and now all looks perfect.

Happy.

First Joomla 2.5.1 site. Tada.

Nice practical upgrade guide can be found here.