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Joomla / Mambo to WordPress 2.5 migration wizard

Posted: June 19th, 2008 | Author: Jeremiah | Filed under: code, projects | Tags: , , , , , | View Comments

In working with a recent client project, I was tasked with porting a site from Joomla over to WordPress 2.5.x. My first instinct is to look at the table structures, write the sql and be done with it but in the sake of saving time, I did a quick search to see what other people have done in this respect.

In my search, I found that Rodney Blevins (www.blevins.nl/missiontech) created a wizard to do the same thing for a Mambo to WordPress conversion. The script works fine on older versions of WordPress but with the release of WordPress 2.5, the table structure changed. With some minor tweaking, I made the script work for the later releases of WordPress and added a simple sprintf to do the table prefix renames for the Mambo/Joomla tables.

I don’t doubt that I’ll need it again and can only assume that someone else will as well so enjoy. It is not without room for improvement but it will get you own your way.
** I have tested this on a few different scenerios but you should use at your own risk (as low as it is) and backup everything in your wordpress install before doing this!
If you don’t know how to do this, have someone to help you.

The Code Already…

  • joomla2wordpress-0.9.zip – 6.19.2008
  • joomla2wordpress-0.9.1 – 9.22.2008 – Minor revisions and tested against WordPress 2.6.x
    • This is the first update to refect the changes in WordPress 2.5.x & 2.6.x. I have also updated the sql to allow for a change in the Joomla / mambo table prefix to be adjusted in the config file instead of a manual find/replace.
    • 3 files are included in the zip file” config.php, index.php & install.txt (instructions)

View Comments on “Joomla / Mambo to WordPress 2.5 migration wizard”

  1. 1 Joomla / Mambo to Wordpress 2.5 migration wizard said at 12:25 pm on June 19th, 2008:

    [...] Go to the author’s original blog: Joomla / Mambo to WordPress 2.5 migration wizard [...]

  2. 2 laztrix said at 7:39 pm on September 16th, 2008:

    Hi,

    I have a joomla website which language is Turkish.I did all the settings according to the instructions.

    When I get to the second step where we choose the section from the joomla website I receive chrachter errors e.g : ç,ğ,ö,ş,ı

    But this did not stoped me to come to the other step (3).I choose the section where I want to put the joomla section content but it did not work !

    I receive this error :

    Query Fail

    I really appreciate if you could help me out to solve this problem and import my data .

    I better give you more specific information about the sistems volumes:

    Joomla 1.5.6
    Wordpress 2.6.2

    Thanks,

    yavuz

  3. 3 Jeremiah said at 8:06 pm on September 16th, 2008:

    Hey Yavuz,

    What are your MySQL charset & connection collations set each the joomla and wordpress tables? Do they match?

    Jeremiah

  4. 4 Yavuz said at 7:44 am on September 18th, 2008:

    Hi Jeremiah again,

    Both of them has the MySQL charset “utf8″ and connection collation set “utf8_general_ci”.However, I could’t find any lines where we have to customize the fileds due to our own charsets and connection collation.Maybe in the index.php file.I yould really appreciate if you could say me where the changes have yo be done.

    Regards,

    yavuz

  5. 5 James said at 8:23 am on September 18th, 2008:

    Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.

  6. 6 Jeremiah said at 5:31 am on September 22nd, 2008:

    Hey Yavuz,

    To be honest, I have never dealt with that particular issue but I’ll be more than happy to help you. Just send me an email ( jeremiahhester[at]googlemail.com ) and we will see what we can do.

    Thanks & sorry you are having trouble,
    Jeremiah

  7. 7 Yavuz said at 10:47 am on September 22nd, 2008:

    Jeremiah,
    Solved or not,I really appreciate your help anyway.
    I noticed your e-mail I’ll be in touch.
    Thanks a lot,
    yavuz

  8. 8 Minor Updates to the Joomla -> Wordpress Conversion tool | Jeremiah Hester said at 11:40 am on September 24th, 2008:

    [...] some minor adjustments to the Joomla -> WordPress Conversion tool and tested against WordPress [...]

  9. 9 Jeremiah said at 11:46 am on September 24th, 2008:

    Hey Yavuz,

    I was able to pull the data over without data loss or character conversion errors by simply setting both the MySQL charset to “utf8″ and connection collation set “utf8_bin”.
    Give that a shot and see if it fixes your issue.

    I have also update the script but it was just minor adjustments and testing against the latest version of wordpress.

    Thanks and let me know how it goes!
    Jeremiah

  10. 10 Jason said at 11:57 am on October 28th, 2008:

    I just used the tool but was disappointed that it doesn’t appear to translate categories correctly even when I had previously created categories to match in WordPress. Also it doesn’t appear that it brings over user accounts at all.

    Still, the content pretty much came over (no links would transfer over though!), so it’s still saved some work though I do still need to do a bunch of cleanup.

  11. 11 Kamen said at 7:42 pm on December 1st, 2008:

    I am trying to transfer from Joomla 1.5.7 to WordPress 2.6.3 and though the export process is “working”. As I try to transfer by category into WordPress, it successfully pulls 0 posts… even though there are posts in the originating database.

    I am transferring across two different hosts, but simply using the URL as the old database path seems to connect.

    The only other thing to consider is that I already imported the posts once with the older version of the software (from the original guy). It pulled all of the entries, but clipped much of the text from the posts for some reason. So I deleted all of the posts from WP. Maybe that did something…. not sure.

    Any thoughts are appreciated.

  12. 12 Nino said at 4:47 am on December 2nd, 2008:

    Joomla 1.5 ???

  13. 13 Jeremiah said at 4:24 pm on December 2nd, 2008:

    Yes, it works with Joomla 1.5

  14. 14 Jeremiah said at 4:28 pm on December 2nd, 2008:

    @Kamen – what do you mean by two hosts? One for the db and one for the code? That should not be an issue. If it is a different host for each application database, that would be an issue.

    @Jason – Yes, the truth is that the original script did not work correctly there and since I did not fix it at the time, it is still broken.

    I will be revising the code over the next few days and it should address that issue as well as a few other items if I have time.
    It is a simple fix, I have just been swamped with the day job.
    The categories thing will be addressed in the next release

  15. 15 arpesenti said at 4:51 am on December 3rd, 2008:

    I’have the same problem of kamen with wp 2.6.5 e joomla 1.5.8.
    The database hosts of joomla and wp are different (godaddy.com hosting). There isn’t any solution?
    Thanks

  16. 16 Jeremiah said at 5:24 am on December 3rd, 2008:

    The easiest thing for you to do would be to copy your joomla tables over to the wordpress database then do the migration. They should have different prefixes so they won’t be hard to separate.

  17. 17 arpesenti said at 1:55 am on December 5th, 2008:

    I’ve copied joomla table over wordpress database, but your scripts tells me “Importing 0 items”,even though there are posts. Any idea?

  18. 18 Kamen said at 8:26 pm on December 15th, 2008:

    Ok, so I exported the entire Database from the old host and added it to a brand new DBase on the same host I am running WP on. I setup the config.php file and it successfully pulled the list categories… which is how I want to transfer the posts. It worked, but the posts it pulled came from another category than the one I chose from the drop down menu. I tried it a couple of times and it happened the same way every time. I also noticed that even if I chose an existing category to import into on the WP side, it still pulled them in as Uncategorized…

  19. 19 Kamen said at 10:23 am on December 17th, 2008:

    I moved the DBase from the old host to a new DBase on the same host as the new site.. so that part is corrected. I am having an odd problem though. When I choose a category to pull from, it’s actually getting posts from other categories. It doesn’t seem random, but it doesn’t match up with the pull down list generated in step one. Any thoughts?

  20. 20 tedmichalik.com » Joomla to WordPress Converssion said at 10:40 am on January 2nd, 2009:

    [...] my condo association.  Joomla was OK, but I found I liked WordPress better.  A search found the Joomla / Mambo to WordPress 2.5 migration wizard by Jeremiah Hester.  Since WordPress is now at version 2.7, his migration wizard will probably [...]

  21. 21 Sumit Bahl said at 6:22 am on January 9th, 2009:

    Hello

    Thanks for the script.
    Its a great tool.
    One problem though, it exports all the data correctly, including the characters.
    But, the data is not associated with any category in wordpress.
    It does not even list under Uncategorised.
    Whats the solution?
    Thanks in advance.

  22. 22 TVG said at 8:19 pm on January 9th, 2009:

    Hey Jeremiah
    Just wanted to leave a note that your script werked flawlessly on a J1.5 to WP 2.6.5.

  23. 23 rodel said at 6:56 am on January 12th, 2009:

    does this work in wp 2.7?.. hope this can..

  24. 24 WPRookie said at 9:09 am on January 24th, 2009:

    Is there a wizard or someone willing to update the wizard to migrate contents from Joomla 1.0.15 to WordPress 2.7? I don’t know anything about mySQL or phpscripts but I can find help with your instructions.

  25. 25 b3000 said at 4:20 am on January 28th, 2009:

    I am attempting to do this (with mambo 4.5.2) I am at the export screen and I clicked on step one and it says:Access denied for user. I have checked the config.php file 3 time to make sure I put in the correct database, username, and password correct, I checked the mambo config file, yes it is the same, yet it will not connect. (after uploading these files I downloaded them again just to make sure they were correct.

    Has anyone had this problem? This is killing me.
    I am no expert but I have modified things before, all the info is correct why will it not work?

  26. 26 b3000 said at 11:57 am on January 28th, 2009:

    Well what I did is look and the index.php file in the joomala to mambo converter and it seems it looks for just these 4 tables:
    mos_categories
    mos_content
    mos_sections
    mos_weblinks

    This correct right I only need these tables?

    So I exported them and crated a new database and then set the migration wizard to look for that database.
    That worked and I got through to step one.

    Then I went to Import articles from a whole section:
    I selected my section and went to step two.
    I selected the category I wanted the posts under and then went to step three.
    At step three it says Query failed after outputting some of the first post (the default about mambo post) There are 360 total posts.

    Any thoughts on how to solve this?

  27. 27 b3000 said at 1:24 pm on January 28th, 2009:

    Ok!
    So I figured it out. I had changed the wordpress table wp-posts in my wordpress database. Before I found this resource I was attempting to do the migration myself. So I set that table back to the original way it was and then ran the migration wizard, and it worked!
    I still have to add pictures back, things like that but hey I was actually thinking of manual copying and pasting everything (I was desperate) before.
    thanks so much for creating this wizard!

  28. 28 b3000 said at 2:19 pm on January 28th, 2009:

    So I figured it out.
    The problem was I had altered the table wp-posts in my wordpress database. Before I found this resource I was trying to convert it myself, which didn’t work.

    After setting back the wp-posts table to the original configuration I ran the migration wizard and it worked!
    Now I still have to upload all the pictures and things like that but I was actually considering copying and pasting all the posts, text, pics etc (I was desperate).

    Thanks so much for creating this resource!

  29. 29 Migrazione quasi completa … da Joomla a WordPress at marco.log said at 8:40 am on February 3rd, 2009:

    [...] http://jeremiahhester.com/2008/06/19/joomla-mambo-to-wordpress-25-migration-wizard/ [...]

  30. 30 Jeremiah said at 9:34 am on February 8th, 2009:

    I’m sorry I have neglected this for so long while the day job has taken over my free time.

    As luck would have it, I will have some free time coming up and I am in the process of re-writing this tool from the ground up to fix some of the known issues as well adding some more functionality.

  31. 31 bb83 said at 2:10 pm on April 8th, 2009:

    Thank you, worked great !

  32. 32 Volkan said at 1:19 pm on April 27th, 2009:

    What is the result about turkish language?

    And thank you for explaning.

  33. 33 Danny said at 10:27 am on May 4th, 2009:

    Thank you for your great scripts, Jeremiah.
    I am trying to migrate from Joomla 1.5.10 to WP2.7.1 but its unsuccessfully. I stuck at step 3 with error message “query failed” after its show only 1 post.

  34. 34 Jeremiah said at 8:14 pm on May 7th, 2009:

    @Volkan – The migration will work fine as long as you have the same character set between the original and new tables (pref utf8)

    @Danny – Do you have any more details about the particular error or possibly a link you could share?

  35. 35 Andreas said at 3:54 am on May 10th, 2009:

    Hi Jeremiah,

    everything went pretty well except two things:
    1. The Posts just shows in the Archive by Date/Month and not in the chosen Category
    2. The Post Titles stopps if ther is a special (german ä ö ü) character in it.

    The Posts are fine, every charater is migrated correctly. I´m using Joomla 1.5.10 and WP 2.7.1 with a collation utf8_general_ci in both databases.

    Any suggestions?

    Greetings from germany
    Andy

  36. 36 Benjamin Jones said at 7:36 pm on May 10th, 2009:

    Any idea how to move the comments over as well?

    Also, with 2.7 the category stuff doesn’t work. Thanks for the great stuff!

  37. 37 Benjamin Jones said at 11:50 pm on May 10th, 2009:

    Nevermind, did it manually in mysql

  38. 38 Joss said at 3:59 am on June 12th, 2009:

    Similar problem to Danny.

    It displayed the first article from the category I was importing from, ending with the timestamp (I think) and then “query failed”

    This was on wp 2.8, however. Has 2.7 + got a different table structure?

  39. 39 PakPenyo said at 9:32 pm on June 15th, 2009:

    Thanks a lot. Works fine with J1.5.9 & WP 2.6.5 with MySQL utf_general.

  40. 40 SneakyDave said at 10:20 am on June 26th, 2009:

    I think the problem with the insert to the wp_posts table is that it’s referencing a column ‘post_category’ which doesn’t seem to exist in wp anymore.

  41. 41 Paulo Matos said at 7:32 pm on July 7th, 2009:

    Hi Jeremiah!
    This sounds like a nice tool. What’s the status of it? Did you manage to get “free” time to work on this?

  42. 42 Sarah said at 2:13 pm on August 9th, 2009:

    Hi there! Trying to use this tool to migrate from a Joomla install. I got everything in the config right as far as I can tell (changed the table prefix to jos_) but it doesn’t seem to be working. Both this and the other resource suggested in the Word Press Codex return the same error: http://blog.masonstreetproductions.com/export/index.php?wpsection=&step=4&section=8

    Importing 61 items
    INSERT INTO wp_posts (id, post_title, post_content, post_date, post_modified, post_name, post_category) VALUES (”, ‘Oh, happy day!’, ‘

    ….a bunch of post content shows here…

    ‘, ’2009-01-20 00:00:00′, ’2009-08-08 19:11:08′, ‘oh-happy-day’, ”)

    Query failed

    Any ideas? I’m such a newb here, I’m not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated!

  43. 43 Artikelen overzetten van Joomla naar Wordpress met Live Writer said at 2:02 pm on September 25th, 2009:

    [...] Joomla / Mambo to WordPress 2.5 migration wizard [...]

  44. 44 africanews.it/english said at 5:27 pm on October 4th, 2009:

    Does all this deleted the SEO work? Or each item will remain indexed on search engines?
    I have a Mambo 4.6.5 and I am trying to move to the latest version of WordPress. Jeremia, can you help me in this when you have some time ?

  45. 45 Feeldak said at 2:37 pm on October 23rd, 2009:

    Hi,

    I would like to know if your plugin works well for a migration from Mambo to WP 2.8.

    Thank you in advance for your support.

  46. 46 wasabinut said at 2:10 pm on February 26th, 2010:

    Are you still working on this at all? When I run the script I get “Query failed” after it gathers a couple of articles. Any suggestions? WordPress V 2.8x

  47. 47 Muchad said at 5:52 am on June 15th, 2010:

    For joomla or mambo to wordpress 2.9.2, u can use plugin from here
    http://it-gnoth.de/projekte/wordpress/wordpress...
    I 've success import all articles to my wp.

  48. 48 344kellogg said at 4:43 pm on August 20th, 2010:

    How much of the Joomla site would this migrate? Is this tool only for blog related content? Or would it literally migrate the entire website?

  49. 49 pixelnated said at 5:02 pm on August 23rd, 2010:

    It only included the blog categories and posts. There is currently a plugin available that is up to date now so I have stopped development on this one (really because of time constraints…)

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/joomla-to-wordpress-migrator/

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