I’ve been using Joomla a lot on my sites and wouldn’t join the army of folks claiming it’s worse compared to WordPress. There’s not so much features in WP you can’t reproduce in Joomla, especially version 1.5, if you know how to do it right.
However, we all are lazy people, and when it comes to convenience, we will do anything to ease our lives. So I decided to move one of my sites built with Joomla to WP platform to have convenience and write posts faster. Searching the web I’ve found this useful Mambo2Wordpress Import Wizard developed by Rodney Blevins. Notice: Mambo is previous name of Joomla. Using this wizard I was able to move my Joomla site to WordPress. So, thank you, Rodney!
I tried to use it for Joomla 1.0.15 and it worked out to export all my messages into the WordPress 2.9.2. Of course, there is still some work to make images and embedded videos to work in WP, make your posts nicely laid out etc,. especially if you used Joomla components and plugins. But in the end I found it better, than recreating all my posts on WP from scratch:)
Step by Step Tutorial on How To Migrate from Joomla 1.0 to WordPress
(If both of your installations are on the same server)
NOTE: Use it at your own risk and make sure before making next steps you have full backup of both your files and databases of your Joomla site.
1. In your root folder of WordPress installation create a new folder and name it ‘export’
2. Download ImportWizard package download link by Jason Anton’s
Unpack ZIP archive to your computer’s hard drive.
Now you have two files: index.php and config.php
3. Modify config.php inserting into upper section your Joomla site’s details and into bottom section your WordPress details. The info for both sections is standard:
- database name
- user name
- password to database
- host (in 99% it is ‘localhost’ and you don’t need to change it)
Modify if needed index.php
You should look what the prefix of your Joomla database is. By default in index.php it is set to ‘jla’, however for most Joomla databases it is ‘jos’. So just make auto replacing of all ‘jal’ with ‘jos’ or with whatever your database prefix is.
To find out what is your db prefix you may got to phpMyAdmin and look it there, but much easier way is to download your configuration.php file (from your root Joomla installation) and look this line:
4. Upload both config.php and index.php to ‘export’ folder you created in Step 1.
5. Call the import wizard by typing in browser’s address field: http://www.yoursitename.com/export/ and follow the steps needed to export your Joomla content to WordPress.
Repeat the export process as many times as need for all of your content, links etc.
6. That’s it – look for your Joomla content inside WP’s admin.
