Upgrading 1.6.5 to 1.7

Joomla! 1.7 is the first major Joomla! release that aims to provide users with a seamless method for easily updating their sites, without any difficult, or time consuming upgrade processes. With the new 6 Month Release Cycle from the Joomla! Project, sequential Joomla! versions will be easily updated in your site. There are several methods you can use to upgrade your site, three to be exact. We’ll take a look at each one of them starting with the easiest one, and ending with the most involved method. These methods are only for current 1.6 users. If your Joomla! site is on 1.5.x, take a look at this tutorial that will walk you through migrating your site from 1.5 to 1.7

Update Manager

The new update manager in Joomla! 1.6 has been utilized to provide “one click updates” for Joomla! users. In order to perform this operation, Joomla! users will have to already be on the latest Joomla! 1.6 version (1.6.5). For those users already using Joomla! 1.6.5, the following steps will easily update your site to 1.7.0

Log in to your Joomla! administrator control panel (www.example.com/administrator), and access the Extensions > Extensions Manager option in your administration menu. From here, go to the ‘Update’ tab. You should see a list of available updates for Joomla!, and any additional components that use the new udpate method. If there are no updates listed there, simply click the ‘Purge Cache’ button in the top right toolbar, then click the ‘Find Updates’ button to refresh the list of available updates. You should now see an item in the list to update your site to Joomla! 1.7

To update your site, simply check the box next to the 1.7 update option, and click ‘Update’!

Installation Manager

If you aren’t comfortable with using the Update Manager yet to update your site, you’re still ok! There are more easy options to update your site. The second method to update your Joomla! 1.6.5 site to 1.7.0 is to use the extension installer, just as if you were installing a component, module, plugin, or template in your site.

To update your site using this method, first, download the update package from JoomlaCode. The 1.6.5 > 1.7.0 package can be found here.

After you download the update package, access your Joomla! installer by logging in to your adminstrator control panel, and navigating to the Extensions > Extension Manager option in your administrator menu. From here you can select the file you just downloaded, and install it. The Joomla! installer will upload the package, and install it, making any changes to files or the database as needed.

Manual Upload/Installation

The last method available to update your site, involves a little more technical expertise, and should probably only be used if the previous methods won’t work due to a highly complex site. For most Joomla! sites, the first two methods will successfully update your site. However, updating is still fairly easily, and should not be a problem.

To update your site manually, you will need to download the 1.6.5 > 1.7.0 update package from JoomlaCode. You can download it here. Using an ftp client, upload the zip files to your server into the root directory of your website, and unpack the files. This will over-write any modified files with new, updated files for 1.7.0. Alternatively, you can unpack the download on your local computer, then copy the un-packed files into your websites root, overwriting the modified files.

After unpacking the files to your website you need to manually delete the files and folders listed in administrator/components/com_admin/script.php

After you have done this you need to manually update your sites database. To do so locate the file installation/sql/mysql/joomla_update_17ga.sql.

Inside you will fine parts like "#__languages". Replace the pound sign and the first underscore with your databases prefix. By default this is jos_. To find what your site uses, open your sites configuration.php and search for $dbprefix the string inside the single quotes behind is what you're looking for. So out of "#__languages" you need to make "jos_langauges" and so on.

Once you've done this go to your sites phpmyadmin and open the database your site uses. There will be a tab called SQL, open this. Paste the content of your modified joomla_update_17ga.sql inside the text area and press go.

Your site is now updated to Joomla 1.7.