Building a clean site in Joomla 3.0

I have tried to move the tables from a 4.5.4 site over to Joomla 3 but things get lost. I thought it was a category issue (same with Jevents). With Jevents, a bit of SQL to recode one jevents table solved the problem.
Can you lay out a strategy for me? My source site is 4.5.4

Since 4.5.4 works fine with Joomla 3.x, you can just use the same version on both sites.
Of courses the categories need to be rebuilt as those are a Joomla core function.

The easiest would be to just use the Joomla updater to go from 2.5 to 3.1. Then SermonSpeaker works without any issues.

Doing the upgrade is a non-starter because of other components in the site. We have tried the upgrade approach in other sites and half the time, it screws up. I have build a clean site with the sermons showing nicely on the back side but they are not showing up on the front. I am still in 4.5.4
check out www.metunited.org/jmv4 try the latest sermon link - it is showing a record with a series of 0. Can you suggest the link that is missing.

Make sure the sermons, speakers and series have valid categories assigned and that the menu items point to this categories.

I had to set the speakers to uncategorized. Solved problem