While technically I’ve already handled the transition of this blog from (DTML-based) COREBlog to (Plone-based) Quills by keeping the old blog running at /coreblog/ and applying some mod_rewrite pixiedust to keep the old entries reachable via their previous URL (/blog/123/) I still wanted to migrate the COREBlog entries to Quills to have a unified archive and to expose the old content to Plone’s excellent search feature.

Also, I figured, it would be a nice starting point to delve into Quill’s sources, get my hands dirty and perhaps even gasp contribute something back to the project by writing a neato migration script. Afterall, when Quills will go “final” we’ll want to offer as many convenient migration paths for as many blogs as possible. And just maybe there are some COREBlog users out there who would like to give Quills a try ;-)

Well, I’m pleased (with myself) to announce samesaid script today. I have tested it about a gazillion times with my own content and added quite some hooks to catch possible show-stoppers such as encoding errors etc. YMMV.

The script has the following features:

• migrates entries including comments and talkbacks (preserving date and author)
• automatically creates categories as needed
• generates copy-and-paste ready RewriteRule statements for accessing the migrated entries via their old URL

and the following caveats:

• new entries are owned by the user running the script: owners of group blogs will have to extend the script to handle ownership
• while new entries will initally have a preserved modification date, this will be lost as soon as they are published. They will show up with correct dates in the archive but search results will show them being last modified when published. If you don’t like that, you’ll have to add the publishing process to the script and then set the modification date to the original value.
• I haven’t figured out how to distinguish open from closed comments and trackbacks in COREBlog, so the script migrates all. If you’ve got lots of comment/trackback spam in your COREBlog instance that you’ve simply closed instead of deleting it (like myself) you’ll either want to add state-awareness to the script or clean up your COREBlog instance before migrating.
• while in theory COREBlog can handle multiple categories per entry I never managed to create entries with more than one, so that’s all this script handles, too.

And finally, at the moment of writing this entry, the script depends on a modified version of Quills in order to preserve the date of trackbacks. I have submitted it to Tom and Brian and if I didn’t totally goof up, it will probably make it into the 0.9 release. For the time being you’ll have to apply this patch to WeblogEntry.py.

As you can see, the script worked (at least) for me: the topics- and archive-sections are now nicely populated making me perhaps the only owner of a Quills blog with content from 2003 ;-)

If you wish to use the script for yourself and experience any problems, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Welcome to Quills!

The migration script can be downloaded here and the patch here.

Update: Brian has moved both - the script and the patch — into the 0.9 branch, so the easiest way to get it is to simply check out the current 0.9 branch by issueing svn co http://svn.etria.com/Quills/branches/0.9/.