The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Well overdue this review after using it with so much success! After the frustration with other tools available we tried a few years ago SP Upgrade as soon as it was released. The suite is excellent and has matured over the years into a very reliable and rock-solid tool to migrate any website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 and/or Joomla 3.0. We are a large global operating, commercial Joomla support organization and we do many, many migrations of all sorts of websites. Every core Joomla migration, small or large is done utilizing SP Upgrade. The largest site we have migrated using this tool was a Joomla 1.5 website with 90,000 articles and a database of 720 Mb. Smoothly and without any loss of data. Links perfectly intact and no loss of Google ranking in the end. The documentation is excellent and is proper updated. The costs are reasonable and you pay about US$ 40 for the component but it is worth the money since you migrate in minutes an average Joomla core site where the "good old" free tools simply won't do the job as good as SP Upgrade (do your research on the Joomla-forums and extension reviews) and they take way more time and effort and repairs after things are completed.
You want to migrate? This extension is the way to go (!)

We're a pretty busy web department for a small advertising firm, and we rarely have time to write reviews like this, but I felt we absolutely needed to write one for this tool, because we would have been dead in the water without it. We were faced with the task of moving 10 old Joomla 1.5 sites done by a previous developer to a new hosting server (which eventually turned out to be upgrading them as well. There were 2 reasons for this move - 1) the sites kept getting hacked and 2)since we were now inheriting the sites, they needed to come over to our hosting plan. Because the sites kept getting hacked, we also recommended upgrading to the latest version of Joomla, obviously. And, it turned out, we wouldn't have had a choice in the matter anyway, as our hosting platform runs PHP 5.4, which evidently doesn't support Joomla 1.5 (which we found out upon initial loading of the new sites). Then the REAL headaches started to manifest when we searched at length for the best way to upgrade Joomla 1.5 to 2.5. Not only are there very few tools out there for this purpose (2, really), but Joomla itself has no formal documentation or recommendations on this matter !(unless you want to struggle comparing the differences in the new db schema and reinserting/manipulating all of your old data to fit the new schema). Oh, and by the way, good luck finding anything even detailed on the exact differences between the old and the new database structures! So, our only choice was one of the plug-ins - either JUpgrade (the one recommended in Joomla's documentation) or SP Upgrade (which we found by doing our own searches - when it really should be in the Joomla documentation too!) JUpgrade operates by running on the same installation as your 1.5 and upgrading to 2.5 from there. SPUpgrade operates on a fresh new Joomla 2.5 installation and migrates your database from the old 1.5 source. Well, turns out the old host running these 10 sites was on PHP 5.3, which can't run Joomla 2.5! Our new host has PHP 5.4, which can't run Joomla 1.5! What a mess! So, we were down to only 1 solution - install a fresh 2.5 on the new host, copy the old 1.5 db over to the new host, and install SP Upgrade and just pray. Well, it worked! After days of research, playing with code, fidgeting data - this just plain worked right out of the box! Gotta say - that rarely happens, especially with Open Source! And even when I had a question, not only were they able to help, but they also answered quite promptly (and we're in the US, and I think they might be in Greece?). All in all, I was mightily impressed and this tool definitely warranted skipping my lunch break today and writing this review!

Want to be abel to do this withotu any hassle... simple and staight to the point!

works locally on wamp and xamp!

I am definitely a novice user and the tech support at spupgrade made my transition from 1.5 to 2.5 easier than expected. I had a lot of questions and needed help almost everyday and they guided me through everything. Definitely would recommend.

I have been wondering around trying some free ones, and none of them work... So i give this a try, and this work without me even reading it's tutorial, like charm. Migrating site from 1.5.26 to 3.0.3 work well. Just buy this, don't waste your time on free one, time is money.

This is one of the first extensions i ever bought. After days of trying the free ones. SP Upgrade does the job perfectly on my local installation with XAMPP from j1.5.26 to j3.03. Worth every penny! Very good documentation. Read secure and things will happen as expected!

Enough has been said about all the time wasted. Ease, for a high school graduate. Cost effective. Time is money and this saves time. No help was needed whatsoever. Worked first time. Period

Thank you! You saved my day. I wasted hours with other tools and ended up with nothing but a headache.
Installed SP Upgrade and it worked perfect. Well worth the money!

Had tried other free upgrade extensions before and did not like the results. Decided to pay for SP Upgrade after hearing about it.

It worked very well, but i came across a few problems, where it appeared not to work properly. My fault, not the extension.

I decided to contact their support and within a few emails, they went into my site and sorted it all out for me.

Excellent customer support makes the upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5 a smooth task, making this extension well worth the cost.

Migrated many sites with this superb component. It's a must have for everybody who wants to migrate old versions quickly and easily!

I have very good experiences with SP Upgrade, that tool just works beautifully and I am very content with the results. Did several migrations with this, where other tools stuck ... so now I am just using this one (never change a winning System).

Great extension! I have now migrated many sites on different sort of server without problems! Also easy to use!
Love you can work on a fresh new site installation.
Thanks!

This is a wonderful component, saves a lot of time and is reliable to migrate a big 'chunk' of old Joomla! 1.5 sites. A MUST HAVE for web designers/developers who are still managing 1.5 sites.

The developer is at different time zone than America but everytime I wrote, he answered back with explanations and even customized the upgrade script to fit my specific need. Upgrade program itself works great. Saves ALOT of time.

Works super. Realy fast and support of the cyend experts.

It works perfectly! Saved me a lot of time. Thank you very much for this good component.

This is worth the money. Keeping ID's for SEO really counts and you will regret it if you don't. I'm am doing a pretty big migration and it is going smooth (lots of extensions). If the worst I can say is there could be some better wording on the mouseovers... it says a lot! :)

Needed to upgrade one of my commercial sites from 1.5.23 to a supported version. I've been using other update tools before, but this the first I've seen where you create the new installation first and then migrate the old content over to your development site. That's how it should be done! No fiddling with the production site, before everything has been adapted and tested!

I tried to migrate directly to 3.0, but ran into display / override problems w/ Joomla's native Contacts component, so I went back to 2.5, again using SP Ugrade. And again it took me less than 30 mins to migrate everything!

Especially, I like the idea that SP Upgrade manages the core stuff for you, and then it has the capability to copy over custom tables (in my case to use with Breezingforms). Worked like a charm!

5 stars obviously!

/Hz

This plugin did exactly what is was suppose to.

I had a site going from v1.5 to v2.5

Some issues, but the developer was very helpful and even went into my site to find the issue!

Articles converted are clean.

I Could not rate the developer more highly and 100% recommend this plugin .

Compared to my previous attempts with another well documented component SP Upgrade came up trumps with no real issues. Okay, some of my modules and templates didn't transfer over but I knew that because they were not 2.5 items. However I don't think that's an issue as I can install the latest (2.5) versions and rebuild that. I was more concerned with getting all my articles and members database transferred, hey presto! Job done. Forget the one with zero support, spend the cash on this and you won't look back. I'm told the component support is very good but I didn't need to ask them, neither should you if you read the user guide and many tutorials out there.
One thing, the images file doesn't (didn't) transfer. but it's a simple matter of copying the contents over in cPanel.
Just going through the process of re positioning my modules to fit the new template I have and pointing the menu items to my new top menu then it should be ready to launch.