BoardJIVE finally converted from XOOPS

[WebJIVE]

I finally dedicated a few days to convert my site from XOOPS 2.1.x to Joomla! 1.0.4 (plus hacks/fixes found here in the forums). If you want to check out my handy work, head over to http://www.boardjive.com.  I still have some ideas on more stuff I want to throw in the skillet (from the south if you couldn't tell) as the site progresses.  The (hacked) template is based on JW_Tribute from Jamboworks (http://www.jamboworks.com).

Regards,
Eric

P.S. I'm a MAC user and was wondering if anyone has tried XHTMLSuite and if that editor works OK in Safari.  That's a huge challenge right now.  Not that I don't like Firefox but I prefer Safari.

[Tocpe]

I'm tiring of the Xoops bickering and stagnation myself and am looking to make the move to Joomla. I saw in forums that you were working on the conversion. I took a look at your site and it looks like it went pretty smoothly.

Care to share your techniques/knowledge/scars with the rest of us former (or soon-to-be) Xoopers to help us make the move?

I'd really like to get on-board with a CMS that is moving forward...

[WebJIVE]

Don't have time for a proper response at the moment.  I have to get prepared for tomorrow.  Once I get some free time, I'll write up something that steps throuh what I did.

Talk with you tomorrow.

Regards,
Eric

[WebJIVE]

Tocpe.

Sorry to take so long to get back. Still busy but I'll lay it out (in a nutshell).  The first thing I did was find all the components I needed (and I needed a lot!) to replicate the functionality of my XOOPS site.  The biggest stickler was transferring forums and XOOPS stories. 

Fortunately, SMF came to the rescue on the forums with a great conversion script.  It transferred all my users and forum categories/posts.  The one thing to watch out for here is dupe email addresses and short user names that Joomla doesn't like.  I made some tweaks in the conversion script that weeded out most of that.

Once the forums/users were converted, it was time for my news articles. The first thing I did here was create a section with matching categories (name wise) to the XOOPS categories.  I slapped some SQL together and pulled that over. In this SQL, I hand tuned the category matching. The one thing to watch out for here is that XOOPS uses the UNIX timestamp where as Joomla uses a date/time timestamp.  MySQL converts that just fine.  The one caveat about moving XOOPS stories (news) over is that if you have embed images, you will need to write SQL to correct the bbcode used or fix it by hand.  I decided to take this opportunity to archive a bunch of stuff and re-edit the frontpage articles since everything else was water under the bridge.

As far as the rest of the site (e.g. weblinks, event calendar, etc),  I just used SQL to pull that directly over to the corresponding modules. 

Overall, with the SMF conversion script, it wasn't that bad.  The whole process took a few days because I decided to do some house cleaning, tweak the new template and dink with gallery2.  The downside with the gallery2 integration component is that the sidebar still doesn't behave.  The author seems to be aware of this and I think is working on it.  If he were to create an "un-wrapped" option, that would correct most of the problems.

If you need SQL examples and scripts, I can roll it up in a zip and post it here.  I don't have time to support what I did but I will share it.

Regards

[Tocpe]

Wow that sounds like a lot to a noob like me. I'm gonna think about this move, but I'm sure other users might be able to make the conversions you made, so it might not hurt to post them for those more SQL knowledgable.

I'll think about it some more, re-read the post when I'm not so tired and see if it's something I wanna tackle.

Thanks for explaining what ya did.

[briany]

Hi Eric,

I will deeply appreciate if you can post the SQL examples and scripts. I'm trying convert a site form Xoops 2.2.3a to Joomla! 1.5. Many thanks for your help!

[WebJIVE]

That SQL is long gone since I did that conversion in 05. There are other examples in the forums where other did the same thing.