SJDGC Forum - Completed ... Finally

So after a nice length of time (20+hours) I have finally finished the migration of the SJDGC vanilla forum to SilverStripe forum. It took a lot of hours for something so small.

The beauty of these types of projects for me is I get to use what ever method I would like to get things done. I get to use my old DB classes I have used for years and some straight no framework PHP coding.

things i missed when first planning
  • html -> bbcode
  • db collation issues
things overlooked
  • posts last edited field when not a topic starter
  • Members in the Community Member Status

After doing some test imports of the topics for the forum I realized a bunch of things I had missed when planning the migration. I forgot the fact that one database was using latin_swedish_ci for collation and one was using utf8-general-ci which led to some funky characters. This was fixed by the following.

  1. if text field change to blob in db table
  2. change back to your previous text field type
  3. set collation to utf8 ... general_ci

The end result of all of this is the complete migration of the old forum into the new system. The users are linked to their respective posts. All the topics and comments are in place and the text is all correct.
A nice bundle of scripts for a Vanilla->SS Forum migration. Also some nice utility scripts for fixing text strings I had to make after some DB corruption/errors/mistakes. And the cherry on top is some nice snippets for my PHP editor for silverstripe and my libraries... gedit :-)

// a super simple to strip non-ascii characters from a string
preg_replace('/[^(x20-x7F)]*/','', $text_to_clean);

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Comments (0) October 17, 2009 5:28 am

relaunch our lewis family

i have relaunched ourlewisfamily.org. this site is for lewis family members to stay in touch and up to date with family happenings and each other.

this is another display of a silverstripe site. i will be including some customizations as the site gets more use and am thinking of a new look for the homepage.

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Comments (0) October 04, 2009 8:40 pm

adding to silverstripe

definitely will be using silverstripe/sapphire a lot more now. best cms and framework i have seen yet.

i am going to modify the calendar module as well as write a custom calendar widget for the sjdgc. after the forum import is finished, that is. this new code will make the event calendar function better and look much nicer. also the site needs a calendar widget in the sidebar, blogs and forum aren't cutting it by themselves.

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Comments (0) September 18, 2009 6:14 am