I was having a problem with remote access to my database that was interfering with the normal use of this programs. I asked for help and got a through answer within minutes with two sensible workarounds.



Given that this was all at 2 am Sunday morning in NY, which was probably 8 am where the author is, that counts as exceptional service well worth the price.

Dave Burstein

Well overdue this review after using it with so much success! After the frustration with other tools available we tried a few years ago SP Upgrade as soon as it was released. The suite is excellent and has matured over the years into a very reliable and rock-solid tool to migrate any website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 and/or Joomla 3.0. We are a large global operating, commercial Joomla support organization and we do many, many migrations of all sorts of websites. Every core Joomla migration, small or large is done utilizing SP Upgrade. The largest site we have migrated using this tool was a Joomla 1.5 website with 90,000 articles and a database of 720 Mb. Smoothly and without any loss of data. Links perfectly intact and no loss of Google ranking in the end. The documentation is excellent and is proper updated. The costs are reasonable and you pay about US$ 40 for the component but it is worth the money since you migrate in minutes an average Joomla core site where the "good old" free tools simply won't do the job as good as SP Upgrade (do your research on the Joomla-forums and extension reviews) and they take way more time and effort and repairs after things are completed.

You want to migrate? This extension is the way to go (!)

We're a pretty busy web department for a small advertising firm, and we rarely have time to write reviews like this, but I felt we absolutely needed to write one for this tool, because we would have been dead in the water without it. We were faced with the task of moving 10 old Joomla 1.5 sites done by a previous developer to a new hosting server (which eventually turned out to be upgrading them as well. There were 2 reasons for this move - 1) the sites kept getting hacked and 2)since we were now inheriting the sites, they needed to come over to our hosting plan. Because the sites kept getting hacked, we also recommended upgrading to the latest version of Joomla, obviously. And, it turned out, we wouldn't have had a choice in the matter anyway, as our hosting platform runs PHP 5.4, which evidently doesn't support Joomla 1.5 (which we found out upon initial loading of the new sites). Then the REAL headaches started to manifest when we searched at length for the best way to upgrade Joomla 1.5 to 2.5. Not only are there very few tools out there for this purpose (2, really), but Joomla itself has no formal documentation or recommendations on this matter !(unless you want to struggle comparing the differences in the new db schema and reinserting/manipulating all of your old data to fit the new schema). Oh, and by the way, good luck finding anything even detailed on the exact differences between the old and the new database structures! So, our only choice was one of the plug-ins - either JUpgrade (the one recommended in Joomla's documentation) or SP Upgrade (which we found by doing our own searches - when it really should be in the Joomla documentation too!) JUpgrade operates by running on the same installation as your 1.5 and upgrading to 2.5 from there. SPUpgrade operates on a fresh new Joomla 2.5 installation and migrates your database from the old 1.5 source. Well, turns out the old host running these 10 sites was on PHP 5.3, which can't run Joomla 2.5! Our new host has PHP 5.4, which can't run Joomla 1.5! What a mess! So, we were down to only 1 solution - install a fresh 2.5 on the new host, copy the old 1.5 db over to the new host, and install SP Upgrade and just pray. Well, it worked! After days of research, playing with code, fidgeting data - this just plain worked right out of the box! Gotta say - that rarely happens, especially with Open Source! And even when I had a question, not only were they able to help, but they also answered quite promptly (and we're in the US, and I think they might be in Greece?). All in all, I was mightily impressed and this tool definitely warranted skipping my lunch break today and writing this review!

Want to be abel to do this withotu any hassle... simple and staight to the point!



works locally on wamp and xamp!

I am definitely a novice user and the tech support at spupgrade made my transition from 1.5 to 2.5 easier than expected. I had a lot of questions and needed help almost everyday and they guided me through everything. Definitely would recommend.

I have been wondering around trying some free ones, and none of them work... So i give this a try, and this work without me even reading it's tutorial, like charm. Migrating site from 1.5.26 to 3.0.3 work well. Just buy this, don't waste your time on free one, time is money.

This is one of the first extensions i ever bought. After days of trying the free ones. SP Upgrade does the job perfectly on my local installation with XAMPP from j1.5.26 to j3.03. Worth every penny! Very good documentation. Read secure and things will happen as expected!

Enough has been said about all the time wasted. Ease, for a high school graduate. Cost effective. Time is money and this saves time. No help was needed whatsoever. Worked first time. Period

Thank you! You saved my day. I wasted hours with other tools and ended up with nothing but a headache.

Installed SP Upgrade and it worked perfect. Well worth the money!

Had tried other free upgrade extensions before and did not like the results. Decided to pay for SP Upgrade after hearing about it.



It worked very well, but i came across a few problems, where it appeared not to work properly. My fault, not the extension.



I decided to contact their support and within a few emails, they went into my site and sorted it all out for me.



Excellent customer support makes the upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5 a smooth task, making this extension well worth the cost.