HOL changes!

Posted by Al Twohill on 9 March 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: php, silverstripe

HOL has undergone a migration to the fantastic New Zealand-based open-source cms that is SilverStripe! It was a bit of an effort, but it could have been a lot harder.

I'm looking forward to adding some new bling that the Sapphire framework gives me.

Migrating Magic

A few people have asked how I managed to get all my blog pages from my ModX database into Silverstripe. After looking through the database I decided that it wasn't practical to import data directly into the database, as the ORM makes it too complex. Instead, I looked for a programmatical way to do this.

I'm not yet sure how to bootstrap the Sapphire API for temporary scripts so I don't know how to harness the Sapphire framework outside of building modules, so instead I looked at how blogs were posted in the first place. I firebugged the blog post form and found that it sent data to /blog/BlogEntryForm. It was easy enough to find the variables that I needed, then turn them into a URL that I could loop through the blog posts I'd exported into a csv file with phpMyAdmin and call.

The end URL format was /blog/BlogEntryForm?ID=&Author=Al&Title=My+Blog+Post&Content=This+is+my+blog+content

Hint: it's a lot easier if you use urlencode() to put all the '+'s in etc