Community Server Upgrade
I did a final test yesterday upgrading dotnet.org.za to Community Server using Kevin Harder's DotText-CS-Converter tool.
What a great tool. It keeps the category and post ID's so with a little configuration change in Community Server it means that all post and category url's would stay exactly the same. So no broken links.
It also converts all .Text image galleries to CS:Galleries and can create CS:Galleries for users who currently don't have a gallery configured. I didn't convert galleries last night but I think that the image url's currently used in posts will be broken. The converter allows for string substitution but I don't think it will be as simple as that as the url's and id's are quite different. If there's a simple workaround I'll implement that but if not I'll continue with the upgrade and unfortunately the img links on blogs will be broken.
When weighing the advantages of upgrading to CS vs. a couple of broken image links the upgrade outweighs the broken links.
The second impact the upgrade will have on some of the blogs is that all custom skins will be lost in the upgrade. Custom CSS and news sections etc will be upgraded but the skins will be reset to marvin. Again there's some great new skins for CS and anyone is welcome to submit new skins.
If there's no death threats by this afternoon I'll continue with the upgrade. I still need to come up with a new look for the main site but that is not a priority at the moment.
[Update I : I had a question about the site structure. The blogs will continue to be at the root ie. http://dotnet.org.za will be the blog root as opposed to the default CS layout of http://dotnet.org.za/blogs. Community Server is very flexible in how the site is structued so all url's will stay exactly the same.]
[Update II: Kevin's tool is pretty hard on resources and the little server (2.4 Celeron, 512MB) hosting this site didn't quite cut it with the upgrade. All the posts is migrated and if you do want to try out the CS admin screens browse to http://beta.dotnet.org.za (Just a temp install to test the database) and log in using your old credentials. The conversion timed-out every time during article conversion so no referrals, comments or galleries has been migrated. We will do the migration later this week at the hosting company with a notebook or computer with more resources. ]
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