Fellowship Hacks » Projects » Blog » Content Migration

Blog content migration

Contents

  1. Blog content migration
  2. Goal
  3. People
  4. Status
  5. Subtasks
    1. TODO
    2. DONE
  6. Notes: discarded migration routes
    1. Route #2: CSV
      1. Status
      2. Todo
      3. Procedure
    2. Route #3: EZ packages
      1. Status
      2. Todo
      3. Procedure
    3. Route #4: XML -> eXtended RSS
      1. Status
      2. Todo
      3. Procedure

This task is part of the FellowshipHacks/Projects/Blog project.

Goal

Find the way to migrate the content of the Fellows blogs from the current ez-publish platform to the new Wordpress MU platform.

People

People working on this task.

Volunteers are always welcome! Have a look at FellowshipHacks to know how you can help

Status

Last updated on: 090202

The migration procedure is based on exporting the blog content as RSS file from EZ and import it into WPMU. Since not all the information is exported from EZ, some data must be migrated from the EZ database to the WPMU one.

A migration route has been found for all components (posts, comments, tags, etc) and has been tested on all blogs.

Subtasks

TODO

DONE

  • Find (and read) useful documentation on EZ and WPMU internals
  • Current EZ platform assessment
  • Complete first list of migration routes and collect information about them

  • Check if it's worth to use the WPDB class to do the SQL scripting work

    • Not really worth unless you are: proficient in OO-PHP and willing to develop a WP plugin
  • EZ RSS feeds contain only the latest 15 entries of each blog

    • The EZ admin panel -> RSS (and the EZ configuration file) lets you set the maximum and default number of entries, but that applies to RSS feeds that you can build with the admin panel, not to the RSS feeds automatically generated for blogs.

    • Found: the parameter is set in line 4 of /design/fsfe/templates/rss_pagelayout.tpl
  • Author: all posts are titled as made by "admin".
  • Check problems in Georg's blog
    • Tried importing Georg's feed into my account, without problems; so it must be a problem on Georg's account

  • Migrate tags

    • The WP RSS importer can import tags (using the <category> RSS element, since there's no <tag> element in the RSS spec); WP will import them as Categories, not as Tags (while EZ only has tags, WP has both "tags" and "categories"; the difference is that "categories" can be arranged hierarchically). If the user is fine with that, OK. Otherwise, WP provides a command to automatically convert (=move, not copy) categories to tags (and vice-versa), preserving the relationship between tag/category and posts.

    • cri: I hacked /design/fsfe/templates/rss_pagelayout.tpl to include the <category> element to the RSS feed, and tested import and subsequent conversion to tags

  • Migrate pictures

    • Blog entries migrated to WP contain links to pictures hosted on the ez platform: see e.g. https://www.fsfe.org/var/fsfe/storage/images/fellows/mk/pictures/booth_blit_08/214498-1-eng-GB/booth_blit_08.jpg

    • cri: I've searched the database for all links to fsfe.org contained in all current blog posts

      • 90% of them point directly to the (ezpublish)/var/fsfe/storage... tree, so all we have to do is to copy this tree to the new webserver

      • The rest point to generic fsfe.org pages, or to blogs (we already have a plan for migration / URL rewriting for these), or to stuff that is no longer available (e.g. to the old fsfe.org implementation in Plone, the old forums)

      • about 15-20 links point to other EZ objects (files, articles, etc) hosted in folders under the Fellows pages outside the /var/fsfe/storage... tree; we can add some custom URL-rewriting rules for these, or ask Fellows to upload the media to Wordpress (the list is in ~/wrk/0812_blog_test/images on cavendish)

  • Migrate comments

  • Migrate trackbacks

  • Test the RSS migration procedure on all blogs and collect feedback from the bloggers

Notes: discarded migration routes

Note: I've moved here the initial notes about other possible migration routes. These are no more relevant, since we've gone the RSS way.

Route #2: CSV

See Ivan s-h@ 081115.

Status

Ivan has installed one ez plugin to export in CSV, but it seems that only thing it can do is export from one database table.

Todo

Procedure

  • Export from ez data in CSV format (through an ez plugin)
  • Import CSV data in WPMU

Route #3: EZ packages

Status

cri: I didn't try it, but I guess it could be useful to migrate other kinds of content: e.g. objects in Fellows home directories: create a package and upload it to the Fellow home page in the wiki.

Todo

Try it!

Procedure

(from the f-h@ archives) 

  Via Administration you can create packages:
  http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/3_8/features/packages
  these content object packages are tar.gz xml and Images etc.

Route #4: XML -> eXtended RSS

Status

Has anybody tried it?

Todo

cri: I would leave this as the last option, since it requires developing XSL code to transform EZ's XML into WP's XML; it's much more convenient for me to work with SQL...

Procedure

(from the f-h@ archives) 

  The content in eZ can be exported as XML and then transformed into
  WordPress eXtended RSS.  eZ allows you to export all
  data as XML - transforming to another XML schema should be fairly
  straightforward.

  Reference:
  http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/3_8/reference/modules/content

  But you can use the extension: http://svn.ez.no/svn/extensions/ezxmldesign/

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