Migrate to Joomla
I am in the process of migrating a big website from Typo3 to Joomla and I am struggling a bit to find the best way to do it.
I realise there are a few tools to batch import articles into Joomla. This is important. But I wish there were tools that could be used, or at least guides, for exporting the necessary information from the old system.
To me, it seems like there is an area here for 3PD to make small PHP based tools - upload a folder to the server, run it and connect to the database. Click on the export button, get an XML file with the necessary info that can then be imported in Joomla.
This tool would have to be able to re-map categories etc. as one system have different possibilities here than the other.
Does something like this exist already? Is it too far fetched? What do you do if you are asked to migrate a site? Pull your hair out? :-)
I realise there are a few tools to batch import articles into Joomla. This is important. But I wish there were tools that could be used, or at least guides, for exporting the necessary information from the old system.
To me, it seems like there is an area here for 3PD to make small PHP based tools - upload a folder to the server, run it and connect to the database. Click on the export button, get an XML file with the necessary info that can then be imported in Joomla.
This tool would have to be able to re-map categories etc. as one system have different possibilities here than the other.
Does something like this exist already? Is it too far fetched? What do you do if you are asked to migrate a site? Pull your hair out? :-)
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Comment by Marco de Jong on February 3, 2010 at 11:17am
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Hi Svein,
I have done this before, but manually. Currently I do not know of any tool that is able to do this job for you.
There are two options, as far as I see it.
1. Let your current Typo3 site export an RSS feed and import this feed into Joomla. RSS feed import components exist.
2. Do it manually ;)
All files uploaded in the fileadmin can easily be copied to the images or images/stories folder of Joomla.
Then you can make a SQL query on tt_content that will convert it into the right format for jos_content. During this job it is possible to point to categories to the content.
However you will do it, it is time consuming, because you will have to verify the data consistency in every step you'll take.
Let me know if you need more info.
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Comment by Arno Oesterheld on February 4, 2010 at 3:49am -
Hello Svein,
I don't know a special tool for this migration but there some generic, open-source migration-tools with visual drag&drop interface that might support you. Of course you will need some time to get familiar with these tools. But I think these tools could also help when importing mass data to shops, population applications with huge amount of information etc.
You can also do special mappings, aggregations, splits etc.
As data sources and data targets you have a huge selection of databases, flat file formats etc.
I can recommend the tool from talend which you can download and run on your PC without any hassle.
http://www.talend.com/index.php
Best regards
Arno
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Comment by Michel Nauwelaers on May 18, 2010 at 6:54am -
Hi Svein,
May I ask which approach you took for the migration.
Did you extract the content via a SQL query on tt_content?
Did you use any of the tools mentioned above?
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Kind regards,
Michel
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Comment by Svein Wisnaes on June 4, 2010 at 9:12pm
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Michel,
The dataextraction had to be put on hold for a little while, but I am now "back on the job" and I have been looking at the different ways to do things.
RSS looked interesting, but I really would like to get things directly into the right categories, so I am hoping to find a way to extract things from tt_content.
One thing I definitely will try again is to export tt_content as a csv file. I have found some tools that allow me to import content into the correct categories (including K2 categories) from csv files, so at the moment, this looks like the most attractive option. I think the most difficult thing would be to get the data out in a nice and structured way, then edit it so I get rid of the stuff I do not need and import.
I can not help thinking that exporting articles from tt_content to csv should be something someone has done before. If anyone here know anything about it, feel free to jump in.
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Well - I decided to jump in and not wait any more.
The best thing would have been to get a specialised tool built to extract the information, save it to .csv and then import. But as I did not have this available, I was able to change the standard number of articles in the RSS feed from 20 to 1500 and use an extension to import the feed into the standard Joomla articles. I set up a temp category for it and it took between 2 and 3 hours to import!
The problems are : No categories. Everything has to be sorted. The text before the "Read more" is missing and has to be copied into every article. And no info on author.
The pictures are missing as well...
The good things:
The simple formatting - italics, bold and links are preserved. And one VERY important thing to me: The original publishing dates and times are preserved.
So now it is only to go through 1226 articles....
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Comment by Robert Vining on July 14, 2010 at 9:31am -
Svein I do not envy your task at hand, and commend you for your persistence in this matter. I have written very small sql scripts to move data from a mossets tree directory to sobi2 before, and it was very much trial and error to get it right. I haven't touched it in probably a year, and the script itself was simple sql commands pasted into PHPMyAdmin. But it did do the trick.
I would think the same thing could be done in your case, as both databases are MySQL.
It might be worth looking into this, instead of copy and pasting 1226 articles worth of intro text along with proper categorization.
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