Joomla 1.5 upgrade error: Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class jconfig in .../public_html/configuration.php on line 2

Even though my blog says .Net and SQL Server experiences, this post deals with Joomla which is an open source LAMP/WAMP etc Content Management System (CMS). My Rotary Club's website was a Joomla 1.0.15 installation and after problems using IE8 beta, Firefox 3 beta 3 as well as Apple Safari (The popup windows when editing content would not work properly) I decided to upgrade to Joomla's new 1.5 CMS.

Needless to say, the migration did not go smoothly and I spent an entire day trying to get the upgraded 1.5 to work.

My situation was that after my upgrade to 1.5 (1.5.3), which completed successfully according to the installer, The site would not work. Trying to view the homepage returned in this PHP error:



Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class jconfig in ..../public_html/configuration.php on line 2



Where the ... is my path to get to public_html directory; yours will different which is why I replaced it with ...



Trying to get to the administration page to login resulted in the same message. Basically this site was dead.



In a nutshell- here is what I discovered: You cannot cleanly do an installation of Joomla 1.5 over a Joomla 1.0.x installation.



After I messed up my site, I found this document which confirmed my observation:

http://help.joomla.org/component/option,com_easyfaq/task,view/id,240/Itemid,268/



I wished the page I used as my guide to upgrade (link below) stated this more clearly.



Details -



I used this page as my guide to the upgrade:



http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joomla15/joomla_upgrade.htm



I would recommend this page to use for upgrading because it has clear screen shots of what to look for as well as a pretty straightforward step by step explanation with the exception of one paragraph which what caused my problem-



Select Joomla-1.5.0.zip from the file list and download it to your Desktop. Next log in cPanel and go to File manager. Once you open it, you would need to create a new directory called dev (since we are using it for development) inside your public_html directory:



Since I was wanting to move my current production site from 1.0.15 to 1.5.3, I placed the zip file in the public_html directory where 1.0.15 resided and assumed that the installer would uninstall any previous versions of joomla before it "installed" 1.5.3. I was wrong. It seems that after the install of 1.5, there were still 1.0.15 files in the folder and during the initialization of the page (index.php) 1.5 and 1.0.15 php modules got mixed together and resulted in the php error. After stepping through the PHP code, it required (loads) includes\joomla.php. In my case this joomla.php file was still the 1.0.15 version and started loading old 1.0.15 php files. It was the includes/version.php file that clearly showed me what happened. The version.php file clearly showed in the code that it was 1.0:



class joomlaVersion {

/** @var string Product */

var $PRODUCT = 'Joomla!';

/** @var int Main Release Level */

var $RELEASE = '1.0';

/** @var string Development Status */

var $DEV_STATUS = 'Stable';

/** @var int Sub Release Level */

var $DEV_LEVEL = '15';

/** @var int build Number */

var $BUILD = '$Revision: 10052 $';

/** @var string Codename */

var $CODENAME = 'Daytime';

/** @var string Date */

var $RELDATE = '22 February 2008';

/** @var string Time */

var $RELTIME = '23:00';

/** @var string Timezone */

var $RELTZ = 'UTC';

/** @var string Copyright Text */

var $COPYRIGHT = "Copyright (C) 2005 - 2007 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.";

/** @var string URL */

var $URL = 'Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.';

/** @var string Whether site is a production = 1 or demo site = 0: 1 is default */

var $SITE = 1;

/** @var string Whether site has restricted functionality mostly used for demo sites: 0 is default */

var $RESTRICT = 0;

/** @var string Whether site is still in development phase (disables checks for /installation folder) - should be set to 0 for package release: 0 is default */

var $SVN = 0;


Joomla 1.5 does not appear to even have a version.php file.



So what I did was-

1. Completely moved ALL files and folders under the public_html directory to somewhere else- Don't delete them because more than likely not all of your files are Joomla 1.0.x. This will now be a "clean" installation


2. Proceed with the installation step 3 from the siteground upgrade document- http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joomla15/joomla_upgrade.htm

After this I no longer received the PHP error and was able to view my homepage but without the template information. I then used my backup of public_html to find my templates folder and then my custom joomla 1.0 template. After copying the custom template folder to the new templates folder in my Joomla 1.5 I was able to see my template but only partially.



This forum post cleared up that problem which was to enable the legacy plugin:



http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=466&t=284778



There were a few other things that I had to do to get my site upgraded but at least it was back online.