Migrating from Raven Nuke 2.4 to ocPortal

Hi,

Has anybody on here achieved this ?

I have started to investigate this along with a colleague from a site/forum we support.

I see that you have importers from phpBB 2 and phpNuke 6.5, I have had a first try with both but errors that I am going to investigate further. Just wanted to see if someone else has been there first and has some hints and tips !!

The phpBB 2 one complains that it cannot log on to the database, not surprising as the Config.php in the forum has been replaced by a Nuke one, I need to understand what RavenNuke has done to the config.

I suspect that we will both be on here a lot while we try and get the site up. We have 7 years of forum posts and 22k+ registered users to import, it will be very important not to lose any !!

Cheers,
Ade

I have not tried the upgrader From Raven however I am familiar with Raven so perhaps I can help look at it to see if we can't figure out what needs changing. My guess here is that your shop and Gallery stuff may have to be manually rebuilt (or at the very least manual query solutions) but I think for the most part users and forums can be brought over without too much work (or at least I hope lol). I'll take a peak at the importer upgraders and let you know what I see within a day or 2.

Chris I was poking around the importers and I am very tired so I may be missing the obvious as I quickly scan but in the phpnuke importer I see an array of tables to import for just about everything but the Forums and Users? Why is that?

Likely that phpNuke didn't have them for whatever the importer was targeted for. I know there have been lots of phpNuke variants, with different situations for how users are handled – I think usually it is done via some unofficial integration with another system, which the importer wouldn't know about.

Thanks for looking at this guys.
PHP Nuke 6.5 did have phpbb 2 integrated. Raven Nuke I think is a 7.5 fork, one of the things they did was to bring phpbb2 into the modules.

Bringing the shop and gallery over manually will probably be fine. We are using OpenCart and Gallery 2, both not integrated at all. So we could continue to run them independently and bring them over in time.

Users, groups and forum posts is where all our data is at. The rest are pretty light weight blocks that would not take long to recreate in ocPortal anyway.

Ok so I did some preliminary poking around and it is my guess you could use a new importer that has a portion of the nuke one mixed in with the phpbb2 one. Problem is both also need a little updating for table names and such. I imagine for someone like Chris who is completely familiar with it he could whip something up in an hour or 2 but for myself as a beginner with the project I am looking at a heck of a lot longer I think to get it right. Time I don`t really have. But I can help guide you if you like. I would start with the phpbb2 importer and look in the file for all the table names for the forums etc. Nuke double prefixes the forum tables I think. You`ll find them all name nuke_bbforums type thing where the importer is looking for nuke_forums (notice the missing bb). Besides that there may be some other tuniy references needing changed like deprecated fields or things. If you look at the nuke importer the banners import codes is different than current raven nuke so that would need reworking but things like that if you find are unnecessary you could comment out or remove. Then just manually add them back in later.

Ok so I decided what the heck I am going to write a Ravennuke 2.4 importer. Please note I am very busy this week so I will squeeze some time in on it when I can but it may take a week or so to complete we shall see.  I have already begun organizing for it already though.  One of the issues will be drawing all the different config values from the various areas needed from users, nuke, forums, sentinel etc but once that is sorted the rest should hopefully be easy as simple modifications to the phpbb2 and current nuke importers. When it is finished I will let you know.

Duck said

Ok so I decided what the heck I am going to write a Ravennuke 2.4 importer ….. When it is finished I will let you know.

I can already feel many gift points being packaged up, and pretty bows being attached, and ….. you get my drift!

 

@Fletch Hehe well I hadn't decided yet on where to spend some money to give back (and also some funds I was counting on still haven't come through) so for now this is going to be one of my give backs.

@Chris or someone else with a sec to answer a question for me that knows the importers API :

I am trying to figure something out here and you may be able to explain it faster than I can track it down (which I've been trying to do).

I have a situation that in RN (ravennuke) holds config values in several places (each settable separately in several places but all likely performing the same function) for instance SMTP server name and login info can be held under bbconfig, and Nuke Mail Config and that's just one example of many. Now I was thinking in my importers config function I would check if values are the same and if not  I would like to halt processing and present the user a choice of which value to use. Is there a method built into the importer API for doing this already and if so can you point me to the quick and dirty to figure it out?

So far I've uncovered 9 different config tables (not counting File based config options) most of which have some over lapping data of some sorts.

Like Allow Anonymous to Post can be set under Nuke Config or under the BB config. (and I am not sure but maybe the user config also lol)

Any help is appreciated.

It's great to see community involvement whether it is feature sponsorship, creating add-ons or other code or just active involvement in the forums trying to assist others. You are setting a fine example which I hope others will follow.

Bob

Now I was thinking in my importers config function I would check if values are the same and if not  I would like to halt processing and present the user a choice of which value to use. Is there a method built into the importer API for doing this already and if so can you point me to the quick and dirty to figure it out?

So far I've uncovered 9 different config tables (not counting File based config options) most of which have some over lapping data of some sorts.

Like Allow Anonymous to Post can be set under Nuke Config or under the BB config. (and I am not sure but maybe the user config also lol)

To be honest I wouldn't even bother. When writing the importers it's easy to get in a mindset of trying to do a perfect migration. But it's never going to be perfect anyway. You are better off just documenting the small tweaks people will need to make.

There's no formal way to do this. It would be possible to hack something in that puts out a form mid-process and links back through to the current URL but with the new value, that the code would be written to recognise and hence not output a form. But it'd be a pain to write and not very elegant.

Make sense thanks. Ok I think maybe I'll approach so that where most likely the proper value will reside will be the place I tend to use first and for those where I think the potential for conflict  might occur I will make it a hard coded option the user can tweak as you suggest.

ie $get_smtp_values_from = "nukeMail" or "Forums"

Hi Duck

Thanks for your message the other day, and thank you for even thinking about creating an importer for RavenNuke, I am the other person helping to run the site with Lhasadreams, but I also have another Raven Nuke site what I intend to move across to ocPortal so this importer will be very helpful.

Kenno

Your welcome. The good thing is when it is done it will be easy to use it to quickly make other nuke importers too cause many of them are very close in structure.  My goal is to make it as complete an import as possible and am going through all the ocPortal config options and matching them to as close an equivalent as I can in RN. I have exported all the different configs for RN into a spreadsheet to compare with ocPortal and am going through it as I have time. Unfortunately I am outta town for a few days tomorrow so I won't get a chance to continue till I am back. Sorry for the delay.

Duck said

Your welcome. The good thing is when it is done it will be easy to use it to quickly make other nuke importers too cause many of them are very close in structure.  My goal is to make it as complete an import as possible and am going through all the ocPortal config options and matching them to as close an equivalent as I can in RN. I have exported all the different configs for RN into a spreadsheet to compare with ocPortal and am going through it as I have time. Unfortunately I am outta town for a few days tomorrow so I won't get a chance to continue till I am back. Sorry for the delay.

 

Bob

Hi Duck, you are a star for taking a look at this. I am away all this week with work and only just catching up with things outside of work !!

Happy to try out early versions of your importer, I do have a coding background. I have a full test system of the site on a local NAS box so can try things out pretty quickly.

I feel I will owe you a beer or two !!

Kenno and myself are really looking forward to moving over to ocPortal :-)

Cheers
Ade

Just an Update:

I ended up out of town longer than expected (just got back today) and only have a couple days home before off again for another week (almost) so the progress on this might still be a while as I ow have other things to also catch up on but that said I will keep plugging away at it when I get the chance ( just wish my laptop wasn't pooched so I could work in down periods while away) and will try to get it done as quickly as I can. I am about half way through the spreadsheet system I created ( I think) to use to compare ocPortal configurations to RN configurations and once that is done I can begin the coding which if all goes well hopefully wont take too long.  

I know users are waiting on this so I am putting in another update.

I had a couple hours today to work on it and was able to finish mapping all the configs in the spreadsheet I had set up.  Then tonight I couldn't sleep so I began the coding. Didn't get much done coding wise yet except start drawing out the remapping arrays but we are off to a good start. I leave out of town tomorrow (today actually lol) morning and won't be back till probably Tues or Wed. Wed is a full day and night booked already so no coding time then but possible I may have time Thurs and/or Fri and if I do we could be testing the importer by next weekend if not then I anticipate hopefully no later than Wed next week. Just and FYI for those waiting for it. Thanks.

Cheers for the update Duck.
I have been reading through the dev guides as well do that I know where tweaks need to be made should we have some quirks in our implementation - there have been some additions and hacks over the years !!

I even had a little play with the importer, copying the phpBB2 one and got as far as getting the groups to import and then ran out of time. Doing this just to get a better understanding as to what is going on.

Looking forward to your first cut of the importer code !!

Cheers
Ade

A little update.

Ok so after pulling my hair out for almost 2 hours working on modifying the downloads section of the importer I finally came to realize that I had been working off the wrong DB the whole time.

I have a couple old local installations of RN and had named one of the DB rn241 and was using that DB to construct the importer for RN241. While trying to remap the downloads portion of the code (basing off the old nuke importer) I kept pulling my hair out as to why none of the DB fields made sense in relation. I was mostly referring to table structure to modify the importer code. Problem was the table structure was completely different but more over, certain sections (like editorials and commenting) didn't seem to exist anywhere (at least in my DB) So I tested adding a download which did show comments. Well where the heck was it being stored as there were no tables or fields that looked like they stored them??

So I pour through the RN (poorly commented) files to try to find the sections dealing with comments and ratings to understand where they are storing them in the DB only to eventually discover the DB fields are all different from what I was working on in the DB????

The sudden realization that I am a dolt washed over me as I looked into my RN config to see that my local RN install (Called rn241) was not using the db of same name but rather one called simply rn. DOH!! Arrggh It appears when setting up my db for 251 I mistyped and put 241 so now my importer is mostly based off that DB and not the one I had intended! lol That said I now have a sort of messy situation in the middle of my importer file to deal with.

Because 2.4 is the more waited upon version I will have to go back and rework the sections I have already done (which I hope aren't that much different) and then also rework some of the changes I have already made to the downloads section to bring it back to 2.4 compatibility.  I have a few hours to spend on it today so I am still gonna try to have a testing version ready for tomorrow if possible.

As of tomorrow though I am out of town again till Probably Sunday or Monday so I will likely not get much done by then or be available for any major rework till then but I will keep you posted.

The good news is I have a 2.5 version importer half done as well lol.