How To Migrate From Mambo To Joomla Content Management System

Joomla Content Management System was forked off Mambo CMS after most of the core Mambo developers disagreed with Mambo Management. The current stable release is 1.0.10. I migrated from Mambo to Joomla to deter hacking efforts on my site.
Note: I could have as well migrated to the latest version of Mambo but I just felt like going Joomla way.

Here are required the steps, simplified and in brief, targeted for command-line users.

Pre-requirement: If you are not on 4.5.2.x versions of Mambo then you need to first upgrade to Mambo 4.5.2.x version.

1. Backup you MySQL database.
For example if your MySQL database is named tango then the command below will create your backup named tango.sql.gz
mysqldump —-opt tango | gzip -9 > tango.sql.gz

2. Extract latest stable version of Joomla to any directory under htdocs. We will assume the name of the directory to be test for simplicity and easy reference. In reality it can be named anything. Only requirement is that it should be somewhere under htdocs.

3. Copy your Mambo configuration.php file (under Mambo root directory) to your Joomla site. Change the $mosConfig_absolute_path and $mosConfig_live_site variables to point to Joomla base / root directory.

4. Copy any custom templates, components, modules, mambots and languages to the same relative locations in the new Joomla directory. Do not copy the default ones.

5. Copy installation/sql/migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql to your base directory.
cp installation/sql/migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql .

6. Delete Joomla installation directory
Go to Joomla base directory and type the following. It should delete the installation directory (without any warning; you have been warned).
rm -rf installation

7. Load the migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql script to your MySQL database
For example if your database name is mambo and your user is root (bad practice):
mysql -u root -p mambo < migrate_Mambo4523_to_Joomla_100.sql
You will be prompted for the password, give it.

8. Open globals.php and change define( ‘RG_EMULATION’, 1 ); to define( ‘RG_EMULATION’, 0 );. This hardens your Joomla installation.

9. If you were using nice url then you should also copy .htaccess from your original directory
cp ../original_directory/.htaccess .

11. On success, first archive the old site and then replace the old site with the new site. For example if your old site is name alpha and your new site is named beta and both are placed directly under htdocs, then you can use the following:

tar -cjf alpha.tar.bz2 alpha/
rm -rf alpha
mv beta alpha


12. Test every pages thoroughly, if possible. Test polls and form submission.

Note: I followed the excellent how-to article to aid my migration. However I differed (as described above) where appropriate (and simpler) and where there were little mistakes (like there are no globals.php-off) in the guide. I prefer using MySQL commanline over phpmyadmin, so this guide shows the command-line way. Check the article referenced to do it using phpmyadmin.

Note 2: Use at your own risk. No warranty, implied or otherwise is provided.