Introduction
Did you know that you can quickly and easily migrate your CiviCRM to CiviPlus?
However your Civi is currently hosted, migrating your CiviCRM to CiviPlus couldn’t be simpler. We’ve built a dedicated CiviPlus migration tool that makes it easy to switch over from your current hosting. The end result is your existing CiviCRM configuration, but with all the benefits of CiviPlus.
Migrating to CiviPlus ensures:
Fully fledged CiviCRM, but with hosting and maintenance made easy
All the best Civi innovations, fully compatibility tested to ensure a seamless experience
Security updates automatically deployed to your instance
Contact us if you are looking to migrate your existing CiviCRM instance to CiviPlus!
Overview
Our CiviPlus migration tool is a tool that allows the CiviPlus team to setup a CiviPlus site using your existing CiviCRM database.
Migration approaches
We have 2 types of site migration depending on your use case:
Standard
The "Configuration Sandwich"
Please see below for more information and steps for both.
Please note that if you have existing direct debit payments (or other recurring payments) these will also need to be migrated to CiviPlus and to our GoCardless integration. Please see the relevant guides that follow for information on this.
1. Standard
The standard approach will be right for most migrations and if in doubt this should be where we start. With this approach we do not do any changes to your site configuration as part of the migration and get you up and running with CiviPlus "as is".
The steps are as follows:
With all CiviPlus migrations we will firstly perform an audit of your site. We will ask you to provide us with administrator access to the site so we can review what extensions and customisations are in place. On occasion we may also ask you to provide us with the actual "code" of the site.
If we are happy there are no complications we can then proceed to a test migration.
We will ask you to provide us with a copy of your CiviCRM database as an "SQL" file. Note that you may need to have database or server access in order to do this.
We will provide you with a secure location to upload your databases to us.
❗️ Please note, once you have provided this database to us it is essential that you do not make any version upgrades or significant configuration changes to your CiviCRM system.❗️
We will then perform a test migration into your CiviPlus site.
We will provide that to you to review.
Once you are happy everything has come across successfully we will then be ready to plan a live migration.
Together we will agree a date for go live.
On the go live date we will ask you to firstly put your site into maintenance mode to ensure no changes are being made to the data in the site and then provide us with a new and final copy of the CiviCRM database in SQL format, as you did before.
We will import that into your CiviPlus site.
We will provide the imported site for you to review and approve.
If you are happy with everything you will be live in your new site!
2. The "Configuration Sandwich"
For some clients we may need to take a slightly more nuanced approach as there might be configurations changes that you want to make as part of your migration in order to make the most of your new CiviPlus. Whilst we would normally firstly advise to migrate to CiviPlus "as is" and then make the changes iteratively once you have come across it is possible with the following procedure to build in steps to add additional configurations to your site. We call this the configuration sandwich as we perform a first migration to import your configurations from your live site, we then perform the configurations and then we then perform a final migration of only your "data" into the site to put you live (with the configurations being the "meat" of our sandwich!).
The steps are as follows:
With all CiviPlus migrations we will firstly perform an audit of your site. We will ask you to provide us with administrator access to the site so we can review what extensions and customisations are in place. On occasion we may also ask you to provide us with the actual "code" of the site.
If we are happy there are no complications we can then proceed to a test migration.
We will ask you to provide us with a copy of your CiviCRM database as an "SQL" file. Note that you may need to have database or server access in order to do this.
We will provide you with a secure location to upload your databases to us.
We will then perform a test migration into your CiviPlus site.
We will provide that to you to review.
Once you are happy everything has come across successfully we will consider the CiviPlus site ready for configurations.
❗️❗️ Please note, once you have provided this database to us we would request that you do not make any version upgrades or any configuration changes to your CiviCRM system. We normally call this a "configuration freeze". This specifically means not making any changes to things such as:
Create, update or delete custom fields
Create, update or delete option groups or option values
Create, update or delete activity types
Create, update or delete tags
Create, update or delete relationship types
Create, update or delete membership types
Create, update or delete contact types
Create, update or delete payment processors
Create, update or delete financial types
Create, update or delete financial accounts
Create, update or delete case types
Create, update or delete reports
Create, update or delete import or export mappings ❗️❗️
Please note this is not an exhaustive list but generally anything that is configured via the "Administer" section of CiviCRM should remain unchanged.
Together we would then agree and make any configurations that need to be added to the site. We'd note that care needs to be taken to only make "additions" to the site and not make any breaking changes or deletions of previous configurations, as doing so may create conflicts which can make the final migration have issues. Note also that some changes, for example adding new membership types, will not automatically move members to those new types. Instead you will need to plan to either update members once the final migration has completed, or configure renewal forms and renewal rules with the new membership types so that members renew to the new type seamlessly through self service.
Once the configurations are finalised we are ready to prepare for the live migration.
The first step for us would be to do a final test migration of the "data" from your live site to ensure there are no issues on the go live date.
We will ask you to provide us with a new up to date copy of your CiviCRM database as an "SQL" file. Note that you may need to have database or server access in order to do this.
We will provide you with a secure location to upload your databases to us.
We will then perform a final test migration into your CiviPlus site of only the "data", but integrating that to the new configurations in your CiviPlus site.
Note:
There are some items which you will need to decide whether you want to bring across the "latest" versions of from your source CiviCRM site, or whether you want to continue with the "new" versions in your target CiviPlus site. If we bring across the "latest" versions of from your source CiviCRM site note that any configuration done in the target CiviPlus site will be lost.
For these items the default is to retain the target CiviPlus site config and as such any configurations added to your live CiviCRM site after the configuration freeze will not come across:
Message templates
Scheduled reminders
CiviRules
Search kits
Afform forms
Case types and case type categories
Contribution pages
Reports
Import and export mappings
Custom fields
Option values
Dedupe rules
Financial types and accounts
Menu changes
Certificates
For these items the default is to migrate the latest source site config:
Groups and smart groups
Once done we will pass to you for approval and if all goes well together we will agree a date for go live.
On the go live date we will ask you to firstly put your existing live site into maintenance mode to ensure no changes are being made to the data in the site and then provide us with a new and final copy of the CiviCRM database in SQL format, as you did before.
We will delete all the data we added previously into your CiviPlus site and import your live data in to replace it, integrating it with your configurations.
We will provide the final imported site for you to review and approve.
If you are happy with everything you will be live in your new site!
Important notes:
Unfortunately the CiviPlus tooling can only migrate sites which are the same or earlier/lower version of CiviCRM than used in CiviPlus, which is normally aligned to the latest ESR version. If your site uses a newer version there may be a short delay until CiviCRM releases a new ESR version and CiviPlus is updated.
On the other hand it can also sometimes be challenging migrating very old versions of CiviCRM. Generally versions after 4.6.12 should migrate but if you have a version earlier than that please do contact us to confirm what the process would be.
As part of the migration our first step will be to perform a review of the code of your existing site. On occasion we may find code or extensions that are bespoke to your site, or community enhancements that are not present on CiviPlus. In those situations we will discuss how we best to perform the migration.
As part of the migration we do not migrate any CMS content. This would include for example content pages, users, webforms, Drupal rules or other items held solely in the CMS. If these are important to you please let us know before we begin so we can discuss the best way to provide you with equivalent functionality. Webforms can often be migrated by "exporting" the node of the form, but you will need to ensure your existing site has the Drupal module node export installed and you have permissions to use it.
We don't normally migrate "files" (i.e. files uploaded to custom fields or attachment fields) but if you need these migrated do let us know. If we do migrate your files it may be difficult to migrate files uploaded via a WYSIWYG editor so please be aware that those will most likely not be possible to move across.
CiviCRM Logs are unfortunately not migrated as part of the process.