The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

This isn't a review; it's more of instructions on how to do this task using this component. I was unable to do this with any other component.

This specifically relates to exporting a user database from 1.0, including passwords, and importing them, passwords intact, into a 1.5 installation, a task which is actually rather hard without this component.

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Migrating users from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.

This initially was a difficult task, but using a few steps I was able to complete it using an open-source extension. Even with this extension there are a number of steps you need to take that I was not aware of, and which took me a while to get through. However, I have heard that many people find imporing users a very difficult task from 1.0 and importing them into 1.5 without a full migration, this definitely worked for me.

Please be aware that this only imports the following fields:
name,username,email,password

It does not import
ID
Usertype
Block
SendEmail
gid
registerDate
lastvisitDate
activation
params

If you need those fields imported then you will probably have to do a full migration, as I was unable to find any way to export and import all of these fields easily. Usertype can be chosen when you import the data, as you will see.

1) Log into phpMyAdmin on your 1.0 site
2) Select the database of your 1.0 site
3) Click the Export tab
4) At the left, select *only* the jos_users section to export. If your prefix is different, I am not sure if this method will work when you import the database, but it should.
5) Select CSV for MS Excel
6) Check the "Put fields names in the first row" option at the right
7) Check the Save As item at the bottom, compression is none, then click Go, and save the file.
8) You have now exported your user database. Open this csv file in Excel or some other spreadsheet program.
9) Delete all columns except "name", "username", "email", and "password". Save this file.
10) Open this file again in a text editor. You should see multiple rows with your field items separated only by a comma.

11) Now its time to install the importer. Go here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/5430/details
And navigate your way to download the 1.7 or later version of Userport. Make sure it's at least 1.7; the older versions cause errors.
12) Install this on your 1.5 site. Navigate to this component in your backend.
13) Set your parameters for "Given passwords are already properly encoded" to YES.

Select User type as "registered" or whatever type of user you are importing. Everything else is up to you, but this should be the only two you need to set.

IMPORTANT: If you have a lot of users in multiple user groups, such as 200 authors, 300 admins, and 1000 registred users, you will probably have to import these groups one at a time, otherwise you will have to go back and change their status to the correct one. For 5 super admins, for example, this is not a problem, but for a wide variety of users, the process would be more complex. You would filter out of your csv FIRST all users who are authors, save the file with only the authors, THEN delete all the fields like in step 9, and THEN import these users as Authors into Userport. You'd need to do this for each group.

14) Click import, then check the No Initial Text radio box, then click continue.
15) On the next page, copy a single line of a user from your open CSV file (which is open in your text editor) you are able to log into the old 1.0 site with, such as an admin account. Paste this into the CSV field, then click add.
16) If all goes well, you should see no errors, and then you can navigate to your current sites front end and try logging in as the user you just imported.
17) Now that you know it works, you can import them all at once this way by pasting your entire csv file in and adding all the users. If your csv file has a "" in it for a user, it might throw an error, but this doesn’t break the process.
18) Now go into your user database and alter any admin or superadmin or special usergroups that people were assigned to. If you have a wide variety of people assigned to usergroups, this method may require additional editing of users after they have been imported.

It took me quite a while to figure this out; this is the simplest way to do this. I went through a lot of paint o figure this out, as I could never get the user fields to export properly from the old site. This method is relatively painless.