Today I was looking into moving our company blog to a new joomla 1.6 test site so I could experiment with a bit of HTML5
Due to the structual differences between 1.5 and 1.6, there is no option to import data from the backup of an old site like it was when upgrading from 1.0 to 1.5.
As I don't like to spend my weekends copying and pasting hundreds of articles for my own experiment whilst not getting paid, I went on the hunt for someone who has already created a solution, and found it!
Thanks to Helios Ciancio over at http://www.eshiol.it it is not only possible to backup all your articles, images, metadata, authors, catagories (and much more) to an xml file and import it into your new 1.6 site, but you can also get your old site to automatically transfer the content to your new site without having to export a file!
Options can be set in the component configuration in your 1.6 site to only allow certain information to be transfered and what to do if the data is already there.
In your old site you just add the url of your new site, give it login information and let it know if the site is Joomla 1.5 or 1.6.
Easy!
The component is also great if you have a nework of sites and you want an article to be published in many places.
It is still relativley new and there are a couple of bugs, but I heard back from the developer within 15 minutes with a fix for my problem.
It would be great to see future versions that allows for plugins for other content types such as zoo, k2 and jea.
5 stars to the developer!
You can find the component for joomla 1.5 on the JED here
and the joomla 1.6 component here