[wplug] Migrating Wiki

[Zachary Uram]

Cool!


On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 11:55 PM, David Brown <dmbrown512 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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


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