I've not been blogging much lately and for the last two weeks it's just been a weekly wrap-up. Most of my time has been spent 1. actually running and 2. designing my new website.

My new website (http://prime357.org) went live on Wednesday 2 April 2008. Prime357 caters for technical computer stuff, stuff that was creeping into this blog.

Since the go-live date I've been fiddling with all sorts of settings in order to re-direct all hits pertaining to Drupal and C++ to Prime357, and it works (the re-direct).

In time I'll remove the menu buttons above pertaining to Drupal & C++. That's not an overly urgent job, click on them and a re-direction occurs to Prime357 anyway.

I'll keep this blog purely for my running and other personal stuff but not geekie stuff.

It doesn't rain unless it pours (and literally here in Melbourne that's happening). I know it was only yesterday when I released the Wordpress converter (5-06) but now I've just uploaded version 5-07 and is available for download. This version accounts for character encodings. Further detail can be found here at the book.

It can be downloaded from here. Enjoy.

Character Encodings

This version addresses the problem of weird characters ending up in the Drupal database and was as a result of incorrect character encodings. For what it's worth the Wordpress MySql database is encoded as 'Latin1' and the Drupal MySql database is encoded as 'utf8' (unicode).

I conducted some tests and specifically tested against this particular sentence:-

“Mares eat oats–and does eat oats—and…little lambs eat ‘ivy’.”

I created a post in Wordpress, including the above sentence. Previously, after importing, the above sentence contained gibberish. Doing the same again, this time with the current version, the above sentence remained intact.

I've also tested against a few other Wordpress files that I've accumulated from users over the past few months and they all appear to be converting correctly.

Connection and Table Prefix

Previously it was possible to test both the source and target database connections though it didn't account for correct table names (table prefixes). What could occur was that a successful connection could be indicated, then when the system began to process records, it'd crash.

What occurs now is that when testing the connection it also accounts for correct Table Name prefixes. The user is advised one of three result conditions:-

1. Successful connection.
2. Successful connection though an incorrect database, check the table prefix.
3. Unsuccessful connection.

Future

b2evolution will be removed from the converter as there seems to be no demand for it. So, it gets the chop.

With the removal of b2evolution I'll also incorporate some house cleaning and clean things up a bit.

I'm happy to report that a new version (5-06) of the Wordpress to Drupal converter is now available for download from here. It basically accounts for a minor glitch (aren't they all). Further info can be found here.

Drupal Table Prefix

This version fixes a little problem where if the target database (Drupal) included a table prefix then the comments data was not transferred across. An error message was displayed, advising the user accordingly, clicking OK the conversion progressed.

This particular problem caused the effect of not being able to add a node, category, comment or user.

This has been rectified.

Character Encodings

I'm still working on this and hopefully by next release it should be resolved, touch wood.

An encoding problem has reared its ugly head and giving me no end of grief.

At the Wordpress end, type in (or more commonly paste in) this line of text:-

“Mares eat oats–and does eat oats—and…little lambs eat ‘ivy’.”

I'll point out that the double quotes starting and ending the line of text are not double quotes, they are in fact curly quotes. Try and find them on your keyboard. Chucked in for good measure are a few other non-standard type characters.

This section details most of the problems regarding the converter. Why some things simply don't work. Actually, it won't be known initially why some things don't work but at least here I'm highlighting that I'm in fact addressing it, somehow.

I'm happy to report a new version of the converter is available for download. I'm up to version 5-05.

I've updated the manual which covers these latest changes. For a brief overview of the latest changes, they can be found here.

Download from here.

I've just uploaded a Mac version of my Wordpress / b2evolution to Drupal 5.x converter. It can be downloaded from here.

As per the Linux version, the Mac version is completely untested. At this point in time I have no idea whether it will work or not. I can't offer any advice on how to set it up on a Mac (or Linux) computer and so make the assumption that Mac users know what to do.

On compiling the Mac version I selected the option "Universal Binary" for the Mac. I believe this basically covers the different Mac versions. Other options available to me were compiling specifically to PowerPC, Intel etc. Before I go down that route I'd first like to know what the issues are with the current Mac version.

For Linux and Mac users, if the conversion is, just not happening, I'd be more than happy to convert for you. That would require forwarding to me an SQL backup file, I'd convert that file to Drupal and send back a Drupal SQL backup file. Hey, that's an alternative at least.

Version 5-04 of my Wordpress / b2evolution to Drupal converter is now available for download from here.

Very few changes made to the user interface, most are behind the scenes regarding how things are done.

Massively huge databases

It became apparent with the last version (all of them actually) that dealing with mega-huge databases was a problem. This version, hopefully, addresses that.