Rebuilding a site offline retaining users Topic is solved

[Peakoverload]

Not strictly a Joomla 4 question but one of the sites I look after is a Joomla 3 site with around 150 users and a forum (Kunena Forum). At some point in the next few months I want to redesign it and move to Joomla 4.

As it will be a complete redesign and because the existing website needs to remain up whilst the new site is developed, I was going to build the new site locally.

However when the new site is ready I do want to add the users from the J3 site to the J4 one and I also want to move all the forum posts etc across as well. The existing J3 site also uses K2 which won't be used on the J4 site and a few users have commented on some of the K2 items (so their user accounts are linked to some articles). These comments don't need to be migrated across. I just want people to be able to login to the new site and access the forum and posts etc as before.

Is it possible to do that or is it fraught with problems? If it is possible, what is the best way to do this and if it's fraught with problems, is it the forum posts that would be the biggest problem? It might be okay to just start with a new blank forum but I'd prefer to keep the existing if possible.

[sozzled]

However when the new site is ready I do want to add the users from the J3 site to the J4 one ...

... and that's the problem.

In the past, if you wanted to create a new J! 3.x website and transfer the users from another J! 3.x website to it, that's fairly straightforward: there are half a dozen tables that you need to export from the original website to the target/under-development site. The tables that contain information about your users are:

• _usergroups
• _users
• _user__user_keys
• _user_notes
• _user_profiles
• _user_usergroup_map

However, the structure/schema of J! 3.x tables is different in J! 4. So, you need to convert those tables to J! 4 and then you can copy them.

This means you need to migrate the original J! 3.x website (or, at least, a copy of it) to J! 4 and then you can transfer the data from your "new" J! 4 "old" website to the J! 4 website that you're building. Does that make sense?

So, the steps are:

1. Make a copy of the J! 3 website (and make sure that it's using J! 3.10.2)
2. Migrate that site to J! 4 (even if it doesn't work properly)
3. Export the database tables I listed above from the migrated site.
4. Import those tables into the new J! 4 website that you're designing.

A couple more matters to consider:

• Kunena v5.x doesn't function properly in J! 4. You will need Kunena v6 which is still being developed (currently in beta testing).
• As far as K2 is concerned, there is no version of K2 compatible with J! 4 at the moment and I do not know what plans the developers have for it.

Good luck.

[Peakoverload]

Ahh okay. That's very useful info thank you. I'm not going to be starting this until all my 3rd party components etc are J4 ready, obviously, but I'm also taking this time to see what I can now do without and K2 will be one of the things that won't make it to the new site.

Thanks again.