Joomla is an Open Source Content Management System with thousands of extensions and designs. This article explains how to upgrade to Joomla 3.x from Joomla 2.5.
At the time of writing this article, only official stable version of Joomla 2.5 was released and suitable on production environments. Joomla also released version 3.x, but it is not recommended on production environment as this version 3.x has to go for regression testing.
Usually from Joomla Dashboard we can upgrade to the newer versions of Joomla. As mentioned earlier, the version 3.x is not fully stabilized to use on production environments, Joomla is not recommended to upgrade from 2.5 to 3.x from Dashboard. Because some of the modules/components/plug-ins used in Joomla 2.5 may not work on Joomla 3.x. Once you automatically upgrade to 3.x from 2.5 from Dashboard, your site will stop functioning or you will see unexpected results.
Before you go for upgrade, check the following:
- Check whether all the components used in Joomla 2.5 will work on Joomla 3.x.
- Check all the modules used in Joomla 2.5 will work on Joomla 3.x.
- Whether the current template supports the new version.
- Check whether the plug-ins will work in the new version.
- Check whether your current PHP version will support the new version.
If all the checks are fine, then go for the upgrade from the Dashboard. To do this, you need to update some options from the Dashboard.
The following steps explains, how to upgrade from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.x.
Step (1). Log-in as administrator to your Joomla back end website.
Step (2). Click on Joomla! Update from Components menu.
Step (3). Under Update Source tab, select “Short Term Support” item from Update Server combo.
Step (4). Once you made the changes click on Save & Close button to save your changes.
Step (5). Go to the Control Panel window. Joomla will display 3.x updates to allow you to upgrade to 3.x. You can follow the on-screen instructions to upgrade to 3.x.
Once the upgrade is successfully completed, your site will start working properly.