Content importing & migration

[ahathaway]

This is a fairly massive issue for those of us with pre-existing content in other wikis or CMS, or who wish to convert others from wiki X to DekiWiki. I would also argue that Deki's adoption rate and success will be determined in no small part by the ease with which wiki content can be imported (to allow wiki fans to easily migrate to DekiWiki).

I have a fairly large TWiki wiki, and at present, I'm reduced to cutting and pasting HTML from TWiki to DekiWiki. New lines get added, links have to be manually removed and recreated one-by-one, and files have to be uploaded. Needless to say, I've had more fun watching paint dry...and then crack and flake off with age. Of course, the revision history is lost, but that's a complicated issue that I don't expect DekiWiki to be able to do much about (TWiki uses RCS for revision tracking). But there must--or should--be an easier way.

I know you all offer services to help migrate from MediaWiki to DekiWiki. If you were willing to expose that functionality, that alone would be a major help (I believe there are ways to translate TWiki to MediaWiki markup). Ultimately, though, any means of importing multiple HTML pages is desperately needed, it seems to me.

Anything that smooths and accelerates the migration path helps MindTouch dig not only into wiki-less organizations, but also allows wiki-using organizations to start reaping the benefits of DekiWiki with minor hassle, making DekiWiki a much easier sell.

[AaronF]

I agree Aaron. BTW, you have a great name. Unfortunately it's a matter of available cycles. We simply haven't had them to provide a DekiWiki importer. Also, in the next month there are going to be some significant changes to DekiWiki that will make it even more divergent from MediaWiki, db schemas, etc. In about a month DekiWiki will be able to import an HTML page. What we'll do is offer code bounties for importers at that time.

The community largely dictates what we spend cycles on; so, the more people pester us about this the higher value we'll place on it. Thanks for your interest Aaron because this is something I want us to do too, but unless I have droves of folks pestering us about it it's difficult for me to justify us spending cycles on it. Anyway, let's revisit this in a month or so and hopefully by then we'll have loads of people asking about it here.

[ahathaway]

As my cut-and-paste fingers grow ever wearier, I figured I'd bring this issue up again. I suspect that this is a feature that more and more customers will require.

Confluence is offering an open-sourced import tool (Universal Wiki Converter) for converting a wide array (ex: MediaWiki, JotSpot, MoinMoin, TWiki, Dokuwiki, TikiWiki, etc.) of wiki content to Confluence content. They have made the source available here, and while I couldn't find mention of a specific license (neither on the site nor in the code), their documentation suggests that this is reusable code.

Their tool is java-based, but might it not be the worst place to start.

One huge caveat: this depends, on a fully functional REST API in DekiWiki, so this may be a down-the-road project.

[ahathaway]

Here's another tool that could be extended (and that doesn't come from the competition):

WikiAPI - The generic Java Wiki API

"The WikiAPI provides a standard java api for accessing wikis from a Java Application. The WikiAPI currenly includes support for MediaWiki and TWiki, however there are more to come.

Along with the library are various utilities which demonstrate or facilitate its usage. Including a java console app to copy documents from one wiki to another."

There's an included example class for syncing TWiki to MediaWiki that could be extended or altered for DekiWiki.

[bstrackany]

FYI there's an importer.php file in the maintenance/ directory that works. I was able to dump a bunch of content from an Excel spreadsheet into individual .wiki files & use importer.php to load it into DekiWiki. HTH.

[mads]

Would be very nice if you could import content from other wiki's

[AaronF]

Converting from other wikis to DekiWiki has become a frequently requested feature. I was hoping someone in the community would put together a tool for this. I thought someone had written something for Mediawiki. MindTouch would even offer a bounty for this if someone were interested in implementing it. Any takers?

[sjb]

What happened to the importer.php tool mentioned by bstrackany. I don't see it in hayes?

Is there any way to just upload a raw HTML page using a script or even from some php page?

[bstrackany]

What happened to the importer.php tool mentioned by bstrackany. I don't see it in hayes?

Is there any way to just upload a raw HTML page using a script or even from some php page?

Ah, that would stink if it disappeared ... I use that thing all the time for our massive wiki.

I could post or host it somewhere but ofc I don't know if it'll work at all with Hayes.

[SteveB]

I'm guessing here, but it might not be too hard to adapt it since the DB format for pages has only changed slightly and the content formatting of Gooseberry is compatible with Hayes. We actually don't upgrade the contents at all until a page is edited again.