I've read through the forums already on this and I cannot seem to find an answer to address what I am trying to accomplish with my migration.

I have a J2.5 site already with K2 and over 14k articles on one template. I have a new template built with different plugins by the same developer which means I cannot just load the template to my current install, without manually removing all the plugins, template, components, etc. and then configuring every plugin, component, etc from scratch.

What I have done is setup J 2.5 and installed the template plugins etc to a new install. What I want to do is migrate K2 data from one install to the new install that's setup and ready to roll.

With this said what is the best approach to move all the data from one install to the next without having to take one site completely offline and rebuilding the site. Please outline the steps needed in order to accomplish this.

Thank you.

As a side note I left out on this. The framework running the new template is not backwards compatible with the framework on the site I am trying to move to the new template.

Thanks.

First of all and most important: Backup your live site before doing anything!

Update K2 on both installation and make sure Joomla! version is also the same.

Migrate all Joomla!'s User and User Groups tables to have the same users and user IDs in both installations.

Now migrate all of K2's tables.

That should do the trick.

Ok. That sounds simple enough, but how exactly do you do that? Is there a migration tool or what?

Thanks for the help.

You can do this through your phpMyAdmin installation. Unfortunately there are no ready scripts for this.

Your talking about a sql export and import is that correct? Do I only export K2 tables or the entire database?

Yes, an export, import procedure.

Export both the Joomla! users and user related tables and all the K2 tables.