Migration from WP to Habari

[Brian Meidell]

Hi,

I just imported my wp blog into a habari test blog, and I must say
that habari feels fast and lightweight in all the ways that wp does
not.

That said, here are a few problems I noticed, and that I wonder if
already are known (please note that I am not just throwing these in
here and expect someone else to fix them, I am asking because I could
fix some of them):

1) The charset of my source wp blog does not match the charset of the
default habari theme
My int'l chars are borked, and I see no option in the options panel
for charset, so I have a few questions:
- Is habari going to have a charset option like wp?
- Would it be an idea to either match the source blog charset in the
target habari blog, or maybe give the user an option of converting?
- Does habari require mbstring to be present in php?

2) The url scheme in habari does not match the one in wp, and so all
my incoming links would break
- Would it perhaps be a good idea to either warn the user of this, or
(even better) detect the source rewrite rules and make the new blog
url compatible

3) My pages are nowhere to be found
This is a minor niggle :)

I think that a painless migration path is worth spending a lot of
effort on, and since I am likely to be migrating anyway, I might as
well make some of that work a part of the migration process.

/Brian

[Brian Meidell]

Also, I forgot to mention:

4)- the fact that the install directory was not publicly writable did
not result in an informative error message, but rather a (to mortals)
cryptic raw php message.

[Chris J. Davis]

I can't speak for all of your points, but at least as far as the
URL's go there are a number of solutions. There is a plugin by
Andrew de Silva called route 404 that handles redirecting the old
links to their new locations.

Also, if you would like to keep you current URL scheme, this can be
accomplished through regex. Ringmaster or moeffju would be people to
talk to on that front, since I hates the regex.

Chris

[Brian Meidell]

I have no qualms about fixing this problem for myself whatsoever.
I am king of regex and very comfy with mod_rewrite, so I am not
talking for my own blog - I am arguing on behalf of the potentially
many people with old wp weblogs who are more likely to migrate to
habari if stuff like this just works out of the box.

Sorry if I didn't make that clear :)

/Brian

[Graham Christensen]

#4 has been brought up a number of times, but it doesn't seem to have a
bug filed in Trac. This seems like it should be priority #1 at the
moment, since seeing a big, nasty, cryptic error message on the
installer is generally a major turn-off.

Graham Christensen

http://itrebal.com - Customized Web Hosting
Graham.Ch...@iamgraham.net

[Owen Winkler]

Brian Meidell wrote:
>
> I have no qualms about fixing this problem for myself whatsoever.
> I am king of regex and very comfy with mod_rewrite, so I am not
> talking for my own blog - I am arguing on behalf of the potentially
> many people with old wp weblogs who are more likely to migrate to
> habari if stuff like this just works out of the box.

Two points:

First, it's really easy to use Habari-native rewrites to get your
permalinks to match up between WP and Habari. I point this out because
it's not necessary to use mod_rewrite to fix this issue.

Second, I've always thought it would be a great idea to include as part
of the WP importer a thing that would store your WP permalink settings
as a Habari option, and then produce 301's for WP permalinks that
redirect to the true Habari URLs (ala the method I hinted at in the
point above). You'd leave the importer enabled for a month or so to let
the 301's sink it, then disable it and be done.

Owen

[Brian Meidell]

> Second, I've always thought it would be a great idea to include as part
> of the WP importer a thing that would store your WP permalink settings
> as a Habari option, and then produce 301's for WP permalinks that
> redirect to the true Habari URLs (ala the method I hinted at in the
> point above).  You'd leave the importer enabled for a month or so to let
> the 301's sink it, then disable it and be done.

This is almost exactly what I am talking about, although I don't think
the 301s should be temporary, they should be enabled permanently,
which seems to be entirely possible with the way the url parser system
works right now: If the blog was imported from WP and the source url
scheme was different, you add permanent extra rules for the WP url
scheme, which 301 to the new url scheme. As an option, of course.

[Brian Meidell]

I forgot to mention that since I wrote the original post and until I
started replying to people, I became familiar with the way habari
handles requests - hence the discrepancy.

/Brian