Migrating Joomla 1.5 To WordPress 4

After many years running a blog on Joomla 1.5, I decided to migrate to the latest WordPress  since it was useless without a responsive design.

I chose WordPress rather than upgrade to the latest Joomla 3.XX for many reasons. One of those reasons are that Joomla 1.5 had so many security issues that had to be addressed; even to the limit of disabling all file uploads to the website account, removing all third party editors, and more.

WordPress was also selected because it is simpler to just create a new template and code PHP however you desire.

The final deal breaker was that WordPress had free migration plugins while Joomla was going to cost.

So, here is how I made the migration that had about 800 blog posts filled with code blocks and illustrations. After all, the blog was about Lampstack development.

1. Installed WordPress to a subfolder
2. Installed the FG Joomla to WordPress plugin.
3. Opened the Joomla configuation.php to copy the database details into the FG Joomla to WordPress plugin.
4. Ran the plugin to make the upgrade. The upgrade happened very quickly and moved images, text, etc.
5. Installed a desired WordPress theme that looked good with the content.
6. Made minor changes to code blogs as a little formatting was lost.

February 24, 2016 by kent