[pmwiki-users] Conversion from a phpwiki

Audun Myhra Bergwitz bergwitz at gmail.com
Sat Feb 14 10:14:22 CST 2009


Mary Sue Ittner wrote:
> I've been looking at wikis for the 
> past week and pm wiki is the one I like the best of all the ones I've 
> researched. 
I will recommend PMwiki. It's easy to learn even if you have little
previous experience with managing websites, and is very flexible and
robust.

> I searched your archives to see if anyone else had questions 
> about converting from phpwiki and found a few messages from 2005 and don't 
> know if the solutions suggested are still relevant.
> 
I don't see why they shouldn't be. Read trough them quickly and there
are no significant basic changes to pmwiki (just new features).

> We have a lot of pages, probably more than 900 and also a lot of images 
> (around 8500) and the wiki syntax is very different for a lot of the things 
> we do (italics, bold, tables, internal links, etc.) 
The solution suggested in the old threads is to do a string replace of
wiki syntax for each page.This might help:
http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/
http://search.cpan.org/~diberri/HTML-WikiConverter-0.61/lib/HTML/WikiConverter.pm

With the GUIeditbuttons of PMwiki it should be rather easy for you to
get used to the new syntax.

> Our image files were 
> not stored in the wiki, but in a files section and originally we just had 
> the url to point to them. One of my wiki helpers figured out a way to do 
> thumbnails for our pictures. Here's how he explains it: " One of the big 
> features was the addition of on the fly thumbnail creation.  If the editor 
> of the wiki page provided the proper syntax around a url to an image file 
> on our server, our customized wiki would check to see if a thumbnail sized 
> image file existed in a parallel directory structure.  If not it would 
> create the thumbnail sized image file, and the parallel directories too if 
> needed.  It would also automatically regenerate the thumbnail file if its 
> timestamp got out of synch with the full sized image file.  This was really 
> nice because we got good page load times because we weren't just sending 
> the full sized images to the user's browser and resizing them.  It also 
> automatically managed the creation of the thumbnail files and directories 
> so the Wiki users could just upload a new image file, edit a wiki page to 
> add their new image and the wiki would take care of it all without any 
> intervention from the user or the wiki administrators." We really loved 
> this feature and would hope we could find a way to keep it.  Perhaps as a 
> recipe?
As you probably noticed uploading pictures to pmwiki is handled by the
attach-markup, so uploading new pictures is not difficult. I suppose
that you can move all the files into a uploads directory and convert the
image links into pmwiki-markup.

As for thumbnails there is a recipe here:
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AutoThumber
I haven't tried it myself, but it seems like it works for some people at
least.

> Switching sounds like a nightmare (we considered it several years ago and 
> none of us wanted to take on all the work.) Now we have more to change, but 
> I think we don't have a choice if we want to keep what we have for the long 
> run. The other option is to have someone create a custom wiki for us and we 
> are looking into that, but I worry about the ongoing support for that and 
> don't know if we could afford it either.
> 
Instead of having someone creating a custom wiki for you, have that
someone help you do the conversion, it's probably easier and cheaper.
Maybe try to ask some of the people that did a succesful conversion
before (seems like Oliver Betz is both active on this list and have
converted from phpwiki earlier).

audun myhra bergwitz



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