Sometimes restoring a full site is not what you want to do. For example, you may have created a site with a wealth of components, modules, plug ins and other bells and whistles but, for whatever reason, you've decided that all you want is to keep the content and start over. Uninstalling all of those extras might be totally cumbersome and time wasting. Or, perhaps, you installed some unofficial patch to the core files and you are afraid to overwrite your installation with the Joomla! Team provided package contents. Maybe you just want to seed a new site with large amounts of your site's content.

Whatever the reason, let's assume you want to keep only part of your data and start over.

Assuming that all you want to keep is database data of a few select tables, JoomlaPack can help you achieve this, when used in conjunction with a misunderstood - and partially misleadingly named - feature called Migration.

The first step is to backup only those database tables whose content you want to transfer to the new site. This can be performed though JoomlaPack. Start by using the table exclusion filter to exclude all database tables except the ones you want to keep. If all you need is the content, good candidates is the content and categories tables. Next up, perform a database only backup. The resulting SQL file is your migration data.

Next up, start a Joomla! 1.5.x installation like normal. At the main configuration page, do not install sample content. Instead, choose to migrate and upload the SQL file JoomlaPack produced. After some fanfare, Joomla! installer will restore your file and you're done.

Of course, using JoomlaPack is not necessary; you could do that with phpMyAdmin, but we find it easier to do everything from within Joomla! itself.