Migration from j.25

alfredopacino

I have an old site in Joomla 2.5. Hello,
Is there a safe and documented way to migrate newsletters, users, and user lists (basically EVERYTHING) from j2.5 to j4?
Thanks

Best

jvstratum

Hi,

Make sure you have the latest version 5.10.24 installed. First thing is to run a database integrity check in Acymailing->Configuration->Security. You'll find it at the bottom of the page. When everything is ok, follow these steps:

Export all tables starting with #.acymailing
Edit your export file and change the all database prefixes to the one belongin to you J4 database
Import your data into your J4 database
Install v 5.10.24 on you Joomla 4 and check if all data is present

If you want to move on to Acymailing v7, install it and migrate your data from v5 to v7 as explained here: https://docs.acymailing.com/setup/migration.

alfredopacino

At the moment I have AcyMailing Enterprise 4.5.0 in J2.5. Can I really safely upgrade to 5.10.24 on my J2.5?

mihha

Version 5.10.24 should upgrade your current version without any issues

The only issue that I can think that could be a problem is the possible low version of PHP that you might have on your server. Version 5.10.24 requires at least the latest version of PHP 5.6.x. If you have lower version, AcyMailing 5.10.24 won't work

alfredopacino

my j2.5 runs on 5.4.7, please don't tell me I have to reconfigure it to 5.6.x😅

mihha

Yes, you have to do that if you want to use AcyMailing 5.10.24

alfredopacino

I've tried to install AcyMailing 5.10.24 on my Joomla! 2.5.17 over PHP Version 5.6.40.
I get the error Unable to write entry

mihha

I really can't help you with that

The issue is with Joomla permissions (I am guessing). Check your PHP logs to see what exactly is going on

alfredopacino

all right, it seems my j2.5 is pretty broken, I can't even update to the latest j2.5 version. Is there a way I can export from AcyMailing Enterprise 4.5.0 and import in AcyMailing 5.10.24 (J4)?

alfredopacino

Ok I faced that problem "unable to write entry" on Windows with the WAMPP bundle, I tried with XAMPP and everything works fine. That is weird, it would be interesting to know what difference the platforms actually have in this case..

alfredopacino

Ok, I managed to update to AcyMailing 5.10.24.
A first attempt of importing data into J4 has failed:

Duplicate entry 'level' for key 'PRIMARY'

Am I supposed to delete data from the tables before importing?

Also, what would be better to export? Structure and data or data only?

alfredopacino

Update:
I see I can safely truncate "acymailing_config" and "acymailing_fields" before importing. That solves some primary key constraints errors.
Now I have another one, it seems in my "acymailing_history" I have 3 entries with:
subid="15161" date = "1632423922"
which is also a primary key violation. It seems subid-data wasn't a primary key before? Is this a bug somehow? Should that be checked in your integrity check script?
I see there are a lot of rows with that problem in that table.

mihha

That was indeed a bug in one of the older releases. In v5 we have fixed this, but since primary keys were not created in the old version, it is possible that you have duplicate entries

Please search on the internet how to remove those duplicates

When you remove everything, and you are able to import DB tables properly, visit AcyMailing Security tab and click "Database management" button. That will check the DB and create properly all required foreign keys, so this problem won't happen again

alfredopacino

A lot of other constraints violation, should I truncate all tables of the j4 fresh installation? Would I get an inconsistent state if I do that?

acymailing_mail is a problem indeed

alfredopacino

What if I try a totally different way and use "your" method of import/export for newsletters and users?
What would I miss, besides configuration?

mihha

You would miss all that newsletter stats and detailed stats

alfredopacino

yeah, but it seems I need an import script to handle the IDs conflicts, just importing the sql dump won't work apparently

mihha

Don't get me wrong but this is getting too far now

Please if you have a paid subscription, open a support ticket using contact form

If you are using Free version, you will have to clean your data and do the import on your own. We have spent way too much effort and time on this topic already

Thank you for understanding!

alfredopacino

I have a paid subscription. I won't get you wrong, but what I'm saying is the solution you provided in the very first post won't work. Simple as that.
I'm providing information about the process I'm going through to try to solve the problem, but also for the sake of other users.

mihha

Solution in the first post works for sure

Don't forget the fact that you are trying to migrate data from AcyMailing 4.9, which is a version released back in 2015. Also, at the same time, you are trying to do this from Joomla 2.5.x to J4. On top of that, the data in AcyMailing tables is not good and as you said by yourself, it has lots of duplicates

The data is not good because of problems with AcyMailing in the past, DB tables didn't have constraints and that resulted in duplicate entries. We don't run from that fact. Every software has its life cycle and there is no software without the bugs. We found those bugs, and we fixed them during the years. If AcyMailing was updated on a regular basis, the issue with the data would be solved long time ago

You should try to fix the duplicate entries first in Joomla 2.5 DB tables

After that, migration would be possible without many issues

Also, I would strongly suggest to use Joomla 3 as a middle man

Migrate everything to Joomla 3, do the proper AcyMailing upgrade and then migrate to Joomla 4