Fabrik for joomla 2.1 to 3.x migration.

Last Updated on December 1, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

I had a bit of a time migrating a joomla 1.5 site to 2.5 and also upgrading Fabrik so all of the forms worked. The following finally worked for me. Your mileage may vary. WARNING the migration from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 is tricky and risky. BEWARE

1. Backup your existing site using akeeba or a similar application.
2. Consider upgrading to the latest PHP, Msql and PHPMyADmin.
3. FTP your existing site to your desktop.
4. Update your Joomla 1.5.x to 1.5.25 (or the latest 1.5 release)
5. Take note of, and update any extensions.
6. Backup again and at each stage
7. If necessary, install mootools.
8. Install and run jupgrade on your 1.5 site.
9. Test the installation in the jupgrade folder.
10. Install Fabrik 3.x and any extensions.
11. This is the tricky part – Run PHPMyADmin
    1. you should see tables with jos_fabrik and j17_fabrik. If not, try reinstalling Fabrik
    2. look at the JOS_fabrik tables and print or note them.
    3. drop the corresponding J17_Fabrik tables.
    4. Copy the jos_fabrik_xxx tables to J17_fabrik_xxx
    5. It appears that there is no jos_fabrik_tables but there is a j17_fabrik_lists table. Back the latter up (Copy to a new name)
    6. Export the jos_fabrik_Tables to a CSV file
    7. Import that csv file into J17_fabrik_lists.
    8. Go to your joomla back end and click on FABRIK under Components.
    9. If you clicked on FABRIK, you should see TOOLS on the right. Look for and click UPGRADE FROM 2.1
    10. I was getting a permissions error when trying to view forms in the front end. The solution was to open each table in lists and then save it. That fixed the permissions issue.
12. Install and configure any other extensions
13. Install your template
14. Check the location for your modules. Things have changed a bit.
15. make sure that everything you want published is published.
16. Ftp the contents of the jupgrade folder to your desktop.
17. Conventional wisdom is to delete the joomla installation files in the root on your server. Deleting via FTP can take some time. I found that I could simply rename the Joomla folders to name-old.
18. Ftp the contents of the jupgrade folder from your pc to the root of your website.
19. Pay attention to any failed transfers and retry them until all files are up.
20. I had particular problems with configuration.php. I had to rename that file on the server before I could ftp it backup.