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Blogs: migration from the old Fellowship portal

All blogs hosted on the old Fellowship portal have been migrated to the new blogging platform on http://blogs.fsfe.org; the migration procedure was almost completely automatic, but there are some aspects to be checked or managed manually, see below for details.

All links pointing to blogs, posts and RSS feeds of the old blogging platform are automatically redirected to the corresponding data on the new platform.

You can see your migrated blog at: http://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME, and log into your administration dashboard at: http://blogs.fsfe.org/USERNAME/wp-admin/ (with your usual Fellowship username and password).

Things to check

The following data have been automatically migrated, and don't need any action (just check that everything is OK and if you spot anything strange, please write to <fellowship AT fsfeurope DOT org>)

  • Blog name
  • Blog posts
  • Comments/trackbacks to posts
  • Images/files hosted on the Fellowship portal and linked inside blog posts (these have been mirrored and no manual migration will be needed)

A note about post licenses: the licensing information for each post doesn't yet appear, but it won't be discarded (it's recorded in our database); we are currently testing some Wordpress plugins to manage blog and posts licenses and we will automatically update the license information for old migrated posts when we have chosen the best solution.

Things needing possible fix

The following data have been migrated, but might need some manual fixes, because of some differences between the old and new platforms (and some limitations of the migration procedure):

  • Blog description: while the old system allowed for free-form (possibly complex and long) descriptions, the new platform typically has one-sentence descriptions (appearing under the blog name, at the top of your blog pages). Only the first sentence of the existing blog descriptions have been migrated: in most cases that's OK, but in some cases (if you had a long text), you must fix the description in the Settings -> General menu of the administration dashboard, and perhaps add your long description to the default About page created for each blog (you can add and edit them in the Pages section of your blog administration dashboard).

  • Post categories: while the old system only has one kind of categories, the new system (Wordpress) has two kinds: categories and tags; the main difference is that categories can be arranged hierarchically in a tree, while tags can't. The automatic migration procedure has turned the old system categories into Wordpress categories (you can see them listed in the sidebar). This could be fine, for example if you have a short number of well defined categories; but if you have a lot of them, which should really be tags instead of categories, there's an easy way to transform categories into tags: just log into your admin dashboard and go to Tools -> Import -> Categories and Tags Converter (you can also do the conversion the other way round, if you change your mind later :-)).

  • The HTML markup elements allowed in the blog posts are slightly different; you might find some problems if you used some particular markup elements in your posts; here you are a list and some suggestions:

    • A known problem: <br /> elements inside <pre> blocks don't get rendered as line breaks (as you 'd expect); you can replace the <br /> elements with real line breaks, or, depending on the context, replace the <pre> element with <code> or <blockquote>.

    • If you have to include code examples in your posts, possibly including angular brackets (<,>), use the <xmp>...</xmp> element.

  • If you had more than one blog in the old system (yes some of you dared :) )

    • All posts from all your blogs have been migrated to your new blog (in the new system each Fellow can have only one blog); you can assign different tags or categories to these posts.

    • Your new blog's name and description are those of the last blog you created, so if this is not OK, please fix them in the Settings -> General administration menu.

  • Non-post content: all items different from standard blog posts have not been migrated, and should be manually moved to the new blogging or wiki platforms. The OldPortal page has detailed instructions about migrating these items.