CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

did you just transfer the files, or did you transfer the entire site (like from a dev site to a production site)?
if just the files, then you haven't actually installed it in joomla, so joomla isn't recognizing the existence of the extension.

transferring files to the site is not the same as installing the extension in joomla.
all you've done is moved files. joomla doesn't see it because you've not installed it in joomla.

there are some core concepts in joomla that you're missing. civicrm is an extension, just like any other extension. it requires a slightly different installation process than most extensions, simply because of it's size. but it still needs to be installed using the joomla installer.

you may want to get a better grasp of joomla concepts before going too much further.

If it's possible to build the site directly on the client's production server I'd recommend that. While moving Joomla from one server to another is pretty simple, moving the civiCRM component that you've installed into Joomla (or Drupal) as an extension to another server is quite complicated. Here's the process for migrating it...

It can be done, but it's kind of a headache because civiCRM stores URLs and server paths in the database as well as in serveral settings files. The instructions are pretty accurate in the link above, except that in step 7 there isn't a civicrm.config.php file in the components/com_civicrm/civicrm directory.

And in my case, I ended up doing a find and replace of all of the changed paths and URLs in my database dump file before overwriting the database.

I also ran into the first error described in the troubleshooting section regarding setting config_backend to "NULL" instead of "N;" which is what was in my record.

You can see some notes on that here...

Btw, I used the Akeeba backup component with kickstart to prep my site and database for the move, which helped speed it up a bit. But I still had to get the database dump I mentioned using phpMyAdmin so I could have a separate SQL file to edit.

Good luck,
herongrace