I have a website at friendlyphotozone.com running CB 1.2.3.

For the last few months, I've been developing an updated version of the site at dev.friendlyphotozone.com (which resides on a different server at a different IP address). This new site runs CB 1.3.1.

Now it's almost time to go live with the new site. Content has been synchronized, and everything looks/works great. But while I was developing the new site, new members joined at the previous site.

How do I transfer these users to the new site? I need to transfer their Joomla accounts and any/all CB settings they might have, as well as their connections.

Once all users are synchronized, I plan to just change the new server's IP address to the old one so that the new site seamlessly takes the place of the old one.

There is a tool called CBjuice which you could use to export/import CB data.
Alternatively you could synchronize the two databases (e.g. my provider has a file transfer and database transfer function). If that can't be done you might have to go through the database, find the new user IDs and export the corresponding rows in all the database tables ...

edit: not sure if the CB database structure was changed between the two versions you use. If so, you'd need to upgrade the old site before extracting database rows, same goes for any plugins or extensions which might have changed the database structure ... *steps back to let the professionals answer*

That sounds easy enough. The upgrade to CB 1.3.1 on the new site was mostly painless, so I don't foresee any issues upgrading the old site. My main concern was with the database differences between the two versions.

Thanks!

Here's some feedback on how it worked out using CB Juice (latest version, beta 10):

First, I had to make sure both installations included the exact same fields. I had deleted a field on the new installation which was still present on the old one, and I had to recreate it (with the exact same name) to import the user list from the old site.

CB Juice allows me to either add missing users, or update all users. I started by adding the missing users. That mostly worked, but the passwords were not carried over properly. I needed to reset those manually and have the members set them again.

Then I updated all users so that any profile changes they made while I was developing the new site would be carried over. That turned out not to be such a good idea. All changes got carried over fine, but each and every user's name (their real name, not their username) got wiped out. They all became blank. I was able to restore those from the database, but it took a long time.

All the users are carried over now, and we can launch the new site.