Fixing up stuff in joomla 2.5.1

I'll simply go through each item that is listed on my SP Upgrade Result log. What I'm doing is opening my Joomla 1.5.25 admin in one browser (firefox) and open my Joomla 2.5.1 admin panel in another, Chrome. This way I can easily put them next to each other and compare and change accordingly.

1. Users.

SP Upgrade moved the old admin user and mentiones how it's renamed that user. In my logfile it also mentiones that it was unable to store a user with id:xx because of a double registered email address.

So checking my old site, I apparently have two SuperUser accounts, which I certainly don't need, so in joomla 2.5, I simply make sure I have one left, rename the username from admin to what I had before and after checking if I can still log in, this issue is tackled.

2. Contacts.

SP upgrade mentiones it was unable to create the contact category with entry key "12" because of a duplicate entry. Checking the front, it indeed showes an error in 2.5 when attempting to bring up the contact information, it can't find the contact details.

So wha't with the duplicate keys in categories.... I saw more in the report. So I checked the database.

When installing joomla 2.5 (without sample data), it creates default categories for the following default joomla extensions/functions and names them uncategorised

• content - ID 2
• banners - ID 3
• contact - ID 4
• newsfeeds - ID 5
• weblinks - ID 6
• users - ID 7

So when you, like me, have used those default created categories in your 1.5 site and have renamed them, SP upgrade couldn't inser them, since SP upgrade tries to insert everything with the same ID's. What SP Upgrade does do, is insert all your stuff that was in said category and leaves them without a category in joomla 2.5.

So solving this is pretty easy, you can either rename the uncategorised category to what you had before and link the orphan contacts or simply create a new category and link them. Or, of course, link them to the uncategorised category without renaming. I'll go with the last option.

Checking the front, and there is the contact stuff, but yuck, it's default Joomla layout and things are working a bit different than they did in joomla 1.5.

First of all, a lot of settings can be made in the component contacts, as to where in joomla 1.5 you set a lot of stuff in the contact item and in the menu item. So I did the following:

1. Open the contacts options from the contact manager and set everything they way I want it to. Since Joomla 1.6, there is also a display option, you can pick from three layouts, sliders, tabs or plain. I like plain the best, so plain it is;
2. Open my single contact item and set all Display options to "use global";
3. Open my menu item and did the same, set all Display options to "use global".

This is how it's meant to be. Set your settings in the component, use global and only make exceptions on contact or menu level where you explicitely want to overrule your global settings. So now my contact page almost looks good, I'll tweak a bit through css and will have to look into the default recaptcha that is integrated in Joomla 2.5. I had a plugin for that in joomla 1.5, guess I don't need that anymore and will just have to get this working in 2.5 the way they incorporated it in the core.

3. Weblinks.

SP upgrade logs the same problem here as with my contacts. Duplicate category ID, so here I can solve it the same way by renaming the uncategorised category and link the orphan links to this category. For weblinks, the settings also have been moved to the component settings, or at least is has much more options now than it had before. Following the same path of actions, I first set everything in the component's options, and set everything in category, link and menu items back to "use global".

Now I have two weblink categories and in Joomla 1.5 I had a list of links in one of those categories with a link to my other category underneath. No matter what I try, I cannot get that to work in Joomla 2.5. It lists all links in one category but no links to my other category are visible.

Will have to look into this. For now, I solve it differently, with a custom module with my links in there.

4. News feeds and banners.

Again, the same problem with the categories. Only I don't use news feeds nor banners on my site, so I basically linked the orphan feeds that were there by default to the uncategorised category.

5. Home menu item.

SP upgrade creates its own home page link (at least, in my case) and to make it look the same as it was in my 1.5 site, I just went through the article options and menu options.

With that, all my basic Joomla stuff is back in place. All that is left to do now is to install my extensions and figure out how to get my content from the old database to the new.

For now: happy with the results.

I'll be back.