Difference between revisions of "Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion"

Revision as of 04:14, 6 April 2010

So, hosting usemod is becoming harder and harder. I'm trying out the mediawiki site conversion tools, as it would be much easier to host that way. Comments? Feedback? - Xyphoid

Comments

What makes it harder? I use both this wiki and MediaWiki pretty extensively, and I must say that this place seems snappier and cleaner, at least. Plus, there's the advantage of not having to re-write a bunch of the sections to fit the different syntax. At the same time, it's your server and time and money. Is it security updates, or some such? I would've guessed that this place didn't need much work anymore... -- GreenLantern

The server it's currently running on will be retired in the near future, so I have to do some work in either case. I have a couple of choices - one is find another place to run usemod, the other is migrate to something else. Usemod is a perl CGI script writing to disk - this is pretty much unique among the stuff we have, and it doesn't suit our load-balancing and configuration. Mediawiki is php+mysql, which is what our main cluster is designed for. Basically I can keep mediawiki with the rest of my hosted content, but soon I won't have a good place for usemod.

Another option is that if someone else has a good place to host usemod wikis, I can pass it over to them.

I ran a test of the conversion and it appears promising at first glance - http://exalted-new.xi.co.nz/exwiki/index.php/WelcomeToExaltedWiki - note that any changes made to that copy will be lost for now as there were some errors reading pages starting with M. There are some obvious layout errors to work out, I'd be interested to hear about any conversion issues with particular pages that people spot (broken links, broken wiki formatting conversion) -- Xyphoid

I've just checked out my userpage as a first step, and first thing to notice is that any link on my userpage that starts with / is broken. It seems the pages actually exist if I type into the url bar, "http://exalted-new.xi.co.nz/exwiki/index.php/Nikink/TrialByFireNotes" but the mediawiki obviously doesn't recognise the '/' format. I'm surprised the conversion worked so well actually, well done! :) nikink

I also observed this phenomenon. A simple solution is to enter the name of the page you are slash-linking off of in front of the dash, e.g. [[Nikink/TrialByFireNotes]] as opposed to just <nowikiXyphoid/MediawikiConversion/TrialByFireNotes</nowiki>. So it's just another layout problem that might need to be fixed by hand. - Han'ya

I am going to have a shot at modifying the export/import tool to fix these up - it's not really practical to fix all of these by hand. Xyphoid

Making some progress.

[[PagePage/PagePage]] -> [[PagePage/PagePage]] [[Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion/SubPage]] -> [[CURRENTPAGE/SubPage]] [[SubPage]] -> [[SubPage]] Page -> Page [[Page]] -> [[Page]] [[Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion/Subpage]] -> [[CURRENTPAGE/Subpage]] [[Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion/Subpage/Otherpage]] -> [[CURRENTPAGE/Subpage/Otherpage]] [[Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion/SubPage/SubPage]] -> [[CURRENTPAGE/SubPage/SubPage]] Page/Subpage/Subpage -> Page/Subpage/Subpage [[Xyphoid/MediawikiConversion/Subpage|SomeText]] -> [[CURRENTPAGE/Subpage|SomeText]]

Okay, I'm happy with the last couple - doing one more test import then we'll go for a real transfer. Xyphoid

Just fyi (again) the links under nikink/characters are broken since the media wiki thinks they should translate to nikink/characters/charactername but the pages are actually on nikink/charactername. Minor, but could catch the unwary. nikink - also, spam! Already!?!? Making logins active will have to be a priority I guess. :(

Can you create an account? I'm going to add the recaptcha spam filter first up Xyphoid 03:50, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

This has been added - you now require a captcha to add an extenral link, or register an account. Xyphoid

Nope - php errors when attempting to create an account. And darn it, so many of my pages are borked! Maybe I was creating them wrong in the first place? Hm. Ah well. nikink Also, running slow. Is that something to get used to with this version of software+hardware? Just curious.

Yep, account is now created. Adding the captcha fixed it. :) nikink

php errors were probably mid-captcha-installation. Speed, we'll see how it goes - there's more going on now, and this is on shared hosting now instead of having an entire server to itself. Xyphoid

I will have a look at bulk conversion of the /characters/charactername issue, whoops. Xyphoid

Sweet, it'd be great if that could be automated - my campaign pages have the same issue, and there's a LOT of links from them! Thanks for looking into it! :) nikink PS: and should we move our previous userpages to our new User:Name pages? Or just leave them as relics? Can they be redirected?

There may be a delay until the 22nd or so with this since I'm on holiday shortly, but I'll have a shot. You can redirect a page by putting #REDIRECT somelink as the only content - so you could redirect in either direction as you prefer. As there's no way of telling what's a userpage unless people actually create accounts, and there are so many historical userpages, I won't be automatically moving them. The main advantage to moving to the User:xx version is that you can take advantage of the autolinks from recent changes, and from typing 3 tildes in an edit. Xyphoid