Phoca Forum

I am working with a group that currently uses another content management solution as their website. I am putting up a Joomla site for them and I decided to use Phoca Guestbook as their new guestbook. How can I migrate the contents of their current guestbook over to Phoca Guestbook?

Thanks.

Daryl

Since I haven't received any reply's, my guess is there is no easy way to migrate from a different guestbook to Phoca Guestbook.

I've been trying to migrate guestbook entry's by exporting out of the original database and import into the Phoca database, but I've had mixed success. Since the users used special characters in their posting, I've been having difficulties getting the import to be 100% successful. I keep running into double quotes, back slashes, etc...

I was able to successfully import in a few users and their posts. However, they do not initially show up in the guestbook. I see that I have to manually assign the name of the guestbook to each individual post. I have to open each and every individual post, assign a guestbook, save it, only then I can see the post. I don't see a database entry for the guestbook that I need to assign these to. If there was, I could easily add that into my import and the posts would automatically get assigned and posted.

There are about 150 posts that I need to import. I am not going to try and manually change each and every one of these posts to the assigned guestbook. How can I get these posts to automatically be assigned the guestbook?

Thanks.

Daryl

Hi, in fact this is not question which can be answered. Because nobody here knows the database structure of previous guestbook so nobody can say what and how to import/export ... Even if you know it you need to do some SQL queries which will load old values (then to somehow to convert such outcomes e.g. in php script) and then import them to Phoca Guestbook ... In fact migration scripts are the most difficult thing which needs to be done by sql(php) export and a lot of time is needed for this

Jan

Jan,

Thank you for the reply.

I'm able get some entries to import, I just have to figure out what special characters are causing issues, and then clean them out. Then I can get a clean import.

So how about my followup question? I have to assign a guestbook to each posting. There is not table entry for guestbook in the database. I was able to get successfully import about 10 posting, but I had to manually assign the guestbook to each of those. If there was a table setting, then I could set it there, and when I did the import, the postings would already be assigned to the guestbook.

Thanks.

Daryl

Hi, there are two tables:
- for guestbooks (so you can create one guestbook in Joomla! in Phoca Guestbook)
- for items (posts) and you can import the posts to this guestbook

Jan

Just wanted to let everyone know that I finally got this resolved.

The issue that I was having was all of the special characters that the posters use in their posts. They used colons, semi-colons, quotes, double quotes etc..... I was having difficulties exporting the original table, tweaking the columns and then importing the data back in and keeping the posts intact. The import kept failing because of all of those special characters.

I ended up using MySQL Workbench to do the job. MySQL Workbench was extremely easy to use. I had looked at it originally, but at first glance it looked like it would be to difficult to use, so I dismissed it. But, once I decided to use it, I was able to accomplish this within an hour or two.

My second issue was getting the posts to show up in the guestbook that I created. During my efforts in importing the data, I discovered that catid was the column that I needed. The default setting is 0, but if I put a 1 in that column, the post show's up in the appropriate guestbook.

Thank you.

Daryl

Ok