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Posted by Derricktawah on
Hi,
I have created a network in Ning with the hope that i could at some stage Migrate it to Drupal. Has anyone here such experience made? Is there a migration module here for migrating any sort of CMS to Drupal?
Please i will be appreciative of any sort of ideas or feedback.
Best rgds,
Dee
Comments
Ning to Drupal
I'm in the same boat. I would like to move all my content and member profile from Ning to Drupal. Any insights, useful links or suggestions would be welcome.
Cheers,
Scott
Free Ning is soon over!!
With the ending of the free ning service I think a lot of folk are going to be in the same boat, they will give us the site in XML format. I'm not proficient at code so I'm not sure how to import it to a Drupal site. My network has about 500 members and is fairly active. I'm learning Drupal and will take up learning code too now, for this and several other projects I'm involved with.
*bump* I'm looking for any
*bump*
I'm looking for any answers for this as well.
Ning to Drupal Gardens tool needed
Drupal Gardens could really clean up and capture a huge market share if someone made a tool to migrate Ning to Drupal Gardens.
I personally would get a least 3 really great networks to move over were such a tool to exist:
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
http://spacemakers.ning.com
http://globalswadeshi.ning.com
Someone, please come to the rescue! :)
Example attempts
The "BuddyPress" community (vs. WP) has done some work to try to create a plug-in for BP that at least migrates usernames.
An open source plugin (http://ningtobuddypress.com/ ) does this:
- Ask you to export your Ning community member list in CSV format (including names & emails)
- Allow you to upload that to your BP site
- Turns those names into user accounts on your BP site.
It does NOT crawl Ning to get:
- Other user data, e.g. Avatars, ...
- Your old community site content
There's a Premium / Commercial plugin for WP (http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/ning-to-buddypress-user-importer ) that claims to snarf the avatars, and provide a little more extensive UI to control the import process. It, too, doesn't import content however.
My guess is that Ning doesn't make it easy to snarf content - e.g. no web API for it, etc. So to fully migrate, there'd have to be a crawler that was smart enough to parse real content (vs. menus, etc.) and create nodes, files/images, etc. - a pretty big job.
Anybody know anything more?
Content export
This link existed at _some_ point on Ning, but currently points to a 404: http://developer.ning.com/tutorials/Exporting_Content
archive.org has the old page, though. See http://web.archive.org/web/20080822115113/http://developer.ning.com/tuto...
There's some code there for what appears to be a PHP module you can create and put onto your Ning site to get content. It looks like it's simply using curl to pull stuff out via the RSS interface.
Though if they're being hard-butts about it they could have changed their module APIs to prevent this code from functioning. Regardless, however, it's hard to believe they could hamstring the RSS, so one conceivably flip this code to simply do the same thing from the outside (vs. running code on Ning.)
Anybody else have any bright ideas?
High level writeup
Hello, all,
I just did a high-level writeup on this at http://funnymonkey.com/migrating-from-ning-to-drupal
The user migration would be relatively straightforward.
If Ning opened their API to support content export, the content export would likely be pretty manageable as well.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
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Ning Archiver released
Ning Archiver was released as while ago, so it is now fairly straight forward to get all the data OUT of a Ning network:
http://help.ning.com/cgi-bin/ning.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3796
The question still remain, however, how best to get the data IN to a drupal install?
Ning to Drupal
"Ning Archiver was released as while ago, so it is now fairly straight forward to get all the data OUT of a Ning network:
http://help.ning.com/cgi-bin/ning.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3796
The question still remain, however, how best to get the data IN to a drupal install?"
I agree... I would also like to know how to get the ning json files from the archiver into Drupal !!
Thanks!
Parser for the Feeds module
I haven't looked at the json code that Ning generates, but the first way I'd try to get this into a Drupal site would be via a custom parser for the Feeds module.
This page has a listing of current parsers for the Feeds module, including a link to an issue for a json parser: http://drupal.org/node/856644
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Success - Conditional and at a Price
You can read the details here:
http://commons.peerforge.com/discussion/migrate-ning-drupal-import-ning-...
This is using the JSON Feeds -> WP-Buddy Press -> Worpress XML Export -> Drupal Wordpress Import
Long process, lots of potential issues, and you may over-caffeinate yourself in the process.
http://alexrollin.com