The Musings of Chris Samuel

Andy Ballam left a comment on my post about migrating from PostNuke to Wordpress mentioning a tool he’s created called migratedata that I though deserved a wider mention..

This might be helpful to people: I’ve just started a project called migratedata (http://migratedata.sf.net/) that provides a framework for migrating between all different types of databases without writing any SQL - just editing an XML file.

It comes with an example that will migrate from PostNuke to WordPress 2.2. Nice work Andy!

Almost a year ago now (Jan 2006) I migrated my blog from PostNuke to WordPress and to do that I used a hacked version of Bryan’s PHP migration script (which I found here thanks to Rich Boakes), but I never got around to publishing my changes.

Changes applied:

• Migrate PostNuke topics to WordPress categories
• Update comment counts in the WordPress database
• Update category counts in the WordPress database

Just had an email from someone asking about it, so I’ve decided to publish it now, so here is my hacked version of a Postnuke to Wordpress Migration PHP Script.

It assumes a blank Wordpress 2 install, and I last used it with Wordpress 2.0.0 so caveat emptor!

Licensed under the GPLv2 (or later), as per the original.

Well, I got an email from Todd in reponse to my posting his story about not being able to contact me. Todd runs the Fall Creek Place Community website that looks like a nice idea, an attempt to help foster a real community through the web (in addition to real life, needless to say!).

Turns out what he was after was not quite related to the xBackends.php script that generates my RSS feed, but the little HTML tags that I used to tell Firefox and Konqueror/Akregator that there is an RSS feed associated with the page that they are viewing, and so to show the little RSS indicator at the bottom of the frame.

I wrote about it before, somewhere, but to recap here’s the little HTML tag that does the magic.

This arrived in the submission basket today..

Today, a user searched frantically for some way of writing to the Administrator, Chris Samuel. Having found nothing, he concocted a fake news story as a thinly vieled attempt at a complaint, in hopes that said Administrator would consider creating some link to internal or regular email, so that said user may ask him a question about his xBackends configuration for PostNuke.

Film at 11.

- Todd.

Todd, it’s easy - you just email to:

chris
at
csamuel.org

and it will (should!) get to me, spam filters allowing…

Note that I’m off on Sunday to Canberra for LCA 2005 and so life is a bit hectic at the moment, but I’ll do my best to answer!

Hoorah! I’ve just replaced the standard Postnuke RSS 0.91 RSS backend.php with the xBackends 2.6 from LEXeBus to give me an RSS 2.0 feed instead of the older 0.91 version.

The two minor hacks I did was to mimic the behaviour of the old backend.php so I could just drop it in as a replacement by setting the following variables at the top of the script:

$show_content=1;        // Default to showing the content of articles
$feedtype="rss2";       // Default to giving an RSS2 feed

With that done I get a successful validation via FeedValidator, viz:

I finally got fed up enough with the dumb way that PostNuke does its time stamping to try and fix it. Basically it uses local time everywhere, then gets you to tell it which timezone its in via its preferences and finally expects users to register and set their timezone so it can re-correct the time for them!

Anyway, this isn’t obvious until you go hunting around for why it doesn’t seem to work if you’re not in the same timezone (or in my case, continent & hemisphere) for where your website is. Googling around for Postnuke “time zone offset” gives some helpful references, especially with respect to a Postnuke Forums posting about fixing it. But before you go off and read that, note that (a) it won’t work on current versions and (b) there’s a simplified variant of the hack. Still kudos to them for working this out!

You’ll need to read on for the guts of the article, as I don’t want to scare the non-techies out there by putting it on the front page directly..

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Got an email from Rich Boakes today saying:

I can’t bear the white box around your masthead any more. See attached !

Well, the attached is now the new masthead - thanks Rich!

Grr, well it appears that spammers were leaving spam comments on here as anonymous users so I’ve now disabled that ability for non-registered users. Apologies to everyone, you must now register to leave comments. Blame those scummy spammers for this.

This highlights the only thing I’m missing from PostNuke, and that’s the ability to have a box that shows the latest comments, the only reason I spotted these was trawling through the MySQL database backend on a whim to see what (if any) comments had been left recently.

OK folks, the
new photo gallery is now up and running, with all the photos from the old one copied over. The captions from the old photos still need to be copied though.

• The Archaeology and Architecture sections from the old one have been merged into a new “Miscellanious” album
• there’s a new “screenshots” album (with images of ReactOS 0.1.0 booting under Bochs).
• our wedding album has now migrated to here as well!

As you can tell, I’ve decided to take the plunge and move the site around to put the Post-Nuke interface as the start page.

The old pages are still there, look at the top left at the “Old Sections” menu block.

Happy browsing!