I have been struggling myself with this question for past few weeks and tried all available options as advised on various Joomla, JomSocial & other forums. Finally I managed to migrate my website www.PakistanRC.com from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 along with all of its 3rd party components & extensions. I tried the following components to do this task.

• J2XML Importer
• SP Upgrade
• JUpgrade
• ARRA User Export Import

Using J2XML Importer

One of the good options advised elsewhere is to use J2XML to export your content to XML format from Joomla 1.5 and to use J2XML Importer in Joomla 1.6 or 1.7 version to import the above mentioned XML file. This extension is free of cost and can be found on joomla extensions directory. However, it does not maintain the IDs of users and you have to do quite a bit of hit & trial and reading before you would get it right.

Using SP Upgrade

Another option is to use SP Upgrade to migrate your users from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.6 or 1.7 version. It would also migrate all "core" extensions and modules, plugins & components. It is a commercial component for about 19 Eur. The owner is from Cyprus and has good support level. I used it as well but again the user IDs were not maintained in Joomla 1.6/1.7. For this reason my other components like JomSocial, Kunena, Announces, Ads Manager etc etc lost their links to the published content & their respective owners. SP Upgrade component is available on Joomla extensions directory

Using ARRA User Export Import

You can also use ARRA User Export Import to export your users from J15 and to import them in J17 but it does not maintain the IDs which again is not much useful anymore is it ? However, it does migrate users very smoothly if you are not really concerned with IDs.

Using JUpgrade

JUpgrade is the official way of upgrading your core Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.6 to Joomla version 1.7. It can upgrade 1.6 to 1.7 or 1.5 directly to 1.7 or 1.5 to 1.6 as well. It also maintains IDs during the upgrade. It tries to upgrade few major 3rd party extensions but fails to make them available in good form. It even messes up some menus & modules. However, this transforms your Joomla 1.5 MySQL database to Joomla 1.7 MySQL database structure, which is GREAT! Because you can use this transformed structure to migrate your users to your new Joomla 1.7 website as 1.7 uses a different way to organize users and user groups.

Solution that Worked Perfectly!

Having tried all of the above optiosn, I finally settled with the following approach to migrate my Joomla 1.5.23 to Joomla 1.7.0 along with JomSocial 2.2.4

1. Use JUpgrade component to migrate your website from J15 or J16 to J16/J17
2. You will have a new set of tables in your live site's database with a different prefix as set in parameters of JUpgrade component. i.e. "J17_"
3. You will have a new folder "JUpgrade" on the file system inside your ROOT directory of your live site. You may change the name of this folder in parameters of JUpgrade component
4. Go to phpMyAdmin -> database of your live site
5. Select below tables and Export their structure & data by clicking on Export from bottom drop down menu
   • J17_user_usergroup_map
   • J17_user_profiles
   • J17_users
   • J17_usergroups
6. Open the SQL dump file and replace "J17_" prefix from all SQL statements to the prefix of your new website, e.g. "jos_"
7. Go to your phpMyAdmin -> database of your new Joomla 1.7 website
8. Click on Import and use the SQL dump file to import users data into your new website's database
9. Now you have all users migrated to Joomla 1.6 or Joomla 1.7 by respecting their IDs and Group IDs etc. This is critical for your other components like JomSocial
10. Now similarly, export all J17_community_ tables from your Joomla 1.5 database (not the Joomla 1.7 upgraded tables which were created by JUpgrade). These are tables with data of your live site.
11. Replace prefix of your old Joomla 1.5 site e.g. "j15_" from all SQL statements using your favorite text editor to the prefix of your new Joomla 1.7 website e.g. "jos_"
12. Import this SQL file into the database of your new Joomla 1.7 website using phpMyAdmin -> Import option
13. Now you have all content of JomSocial & Users in your new site. Still you would not see images & thumbnails on JomSocial content because they are in file system of your old site and we haven't yet migrated that.
14. Now copy below folders from your Joomla 1.5 or 1.6 site to ROOT/images folder of your new Joomla 1.7 site
    • ROOT/images/videos
    • ROOT/images/photos
    • ROOT/images/originalphotos
    • ROOT/images/groupphotos
    • ROOT/images/avatar
15. Congratulations, Now you have a fully upgraded JomSocial from Joomla 1.5 or 1.6 to Joomla 1.7!

I hope it helped you and saved many hours of hit and trials :)