[wplug] Migrating Wiki

[David Brown]

I asked last week about a consultant to help migrate a Wiki but ended up 
solving it myself and thought I'd share the solution.  I needed to 
migrate mediawiki 1.6 from Box A running Ubuntu 8.04 and similarly old 
LAMP components to mediawiki 1.19 on Box B running 12.04.  I was 
unwilling to just try upgrading directly on the "production server."  I 
tried installing the old version of mediawiki and database on Box B, but 
with all the system differences it just didn't work.  I thought I was 
facing some weird ordeal of research into compatibility of historical 
versions and partial upgrades on a test server.  But after some more 
browsing I found a better answer.

The solution was to list all the pages of the wiki using 
Special:Allpages and save them to a text file.  Then I exported those 
pages' data using Special:Export.  You paste a list of page names into a 
text box and you get an XML file of their data.  I had to export the 
pages in about a dozen groups - it choked trying to export them all at 
once.  Then I used Box B's Special:Import to pull in the XML.  It worked 
great.  A few tweaks and I was done.

It was so easy I didn't mind doing it over again because I realized 
while it was in the XML form I could edit various strings and URLs, so 
no SQL needed!  I also took the opportunity this time to remove from the 
wiki various orphaned pages, near-duplicates, empty pages, and other 
cruft, just by removing their names from the page list so they wouldn't 
get exported.

What fun!

Dave