User profile for user: Chad_C
Chad_C Author
User level: Level 1
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Transferring Content from MediaWiki to Apple's Wiki

Has anyone attempted this yet? We have 100+ pages and manually copying content is not enticing to me!

It has been suggested to do the following:
1) go to Special:Allpages and Special:Listusers
2) open each page separately in a new tab (in Safari)
3) click on edit (this will give you the rendered page as well as the markup)
4) then save as Web Archive
5) then backed up all the images from the MediaWiki installation

But this is rather ugly!

I wish there was more documentation on the Apple Wiki, but I suppose that since it is so new there's much to learn. A "Missing Manual" would be nice! We take advantage of a few MediaWiki features (templates, <code>, etc) and it would be nice to learn how to do something comparable in the Apple Wiki.

The look and feel of the Apple Wiki is far superior (for end users) than MediaWiki (or any theme you can apply to MediaWiki).

Xserve & MBP v2.0, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Nov 26, 2007 12:25 PM

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User profile for user: Chris Thorman
Chris Thorman
User level: Level 1
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Jan 3, 2008 9:17 AM in response to Chad_C

It is clear (to me at least, speaking as an outsider) that Apple has heard this request loudly and clearly.

It was informally announced at WWDC (can't recall whether it was 06 or 07) that there would be a tool (probably something like a perl script -- not a polished application) created by Apple to help ease transitions from MediaWiki -- something like an automated or semi-automated import.

After Leopard was released, I checked with some friends there on the team responsible for creating this tool, and the word was that they're working on it but needed a few weeks of downtime to recover from the Leopard release effort, holiday schedules, etc.. They said that the tool would be free and would be released via the ADC (developer connection) web site once available and that I should watch that space for its arrival. No further promises or specificity could be given regarding dates, feature set, etc., since if done, this would be a freebie/skunkworks/time-permitting sort of project, probably not a supported product or formal release.

Personally, I help administer a 2,000+-page MediaWiki instance and do plan to do this migration; however I'm going to wait for such a tool from Apple or another third party before I do it.
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User profile for user: Thyb
Thyb
User level: Level 1
5 points

Mar 12, 2008 11:53 PM in response to Chad_C

The tool to migrate content from other wikis to teamserver exist. It can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) website since the 10 March. If you don’t have an account you can open one for free.

The tools can be found under:
ADC website/downloads/Mac OS X Server/AppleWikiImporter (Disk Image)

The first paragraph of the Readme file says :

The Apple Wiki Importer tool can be used to import third-party sites (usually from other wiki software) into Apple's wiki. This application may require some knowledge of CSS selectors and, in more extreme cases, may require some JavaScript. It can crawl nearly any site which has an index page (which lists all pages in the wiki) and import it into Apple's Wiki Server.
Any import is based on a Wiki Export Document, which describes the CSS selectors and JavaScript filters necessary to scrape content from a given page. This project includes sample export documents for a couple of the different wiki packages out there, including MediaWiki and Trac.


(I hope I’m not breaking my ADC licence agreement by pasting this quote)
However I never used it yet.

Also remember it’s a developer tool, certainly not a completely finished and polished application.
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User profile for user: Chad_C
Chad_C Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

Mar 18, 2008 6:08 AM in response to Thyb

I hope not as well! I was going to post it but I didn't know what sort of information was allowed.

To continue the discussion on the tool, I will mention that I have not been able to get it to work properly with MediaWiki. For some reason, it will not "see" my AllPages page the same as Safari, so copying and pasting the address has been disappointing at best -- this is with the MediaWiki export document that comes with the tool. I think it's related to the customizations of the export document because if I just open WikiImporter and paste in my AllPages URL, the pages (the listings) actually show up. I'm going to slowly add the code from the MediaWiki export document and see where it's failing.

I'll post my results. I have yet to find any sort of support for this tool -- I know it's a dev tool -- but any sort of discussion or anything.
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User profile for user: Chad_C
Chad_C Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

Mar 18, 2008 8:10 PM in response to Chad_C

I'm not a web developer so it's taking me some time to trial-and-error the Exporter to work. Here are a few of my problems so far:

1) I had to remove the following line from the MediaWiki Export Document in order for the pages to actually show up in the "All Pages" site on my wiki but through the Export software:

{quote:}
// if we're on the index page, expand the "to" links
if (location.href == appleWikiImporter.indexPageURL()) {
$$('a').each(function(a) {
if (a.href && a.innerText == 'to') {
add index_links_fromurl(a.href);
}
});

$$('a').invoke('remove');
}
{quote}

2) The "tags" that are generated when importing include a bunch of nonsense that appears to be every link in the MediaWiki article as well as the full text of the article itself. I guess this is where I need to be more specific about what tags to identify.

3) Links internal to my MediaWiki pages still point to a MediaWiki page and not to an Apple Wiki page.

I will post a comprehensive overview of my version of MediaWiki, extensions, and skin to provide more details tomorrow.

I marked this question as "answered" but I'll continue to post in an effort to help anyone attempting to do the same thing.
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User profile for user: Chad_C
Chad_C Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

Mar 19, 2008 8:17 PM in response to Chad_C

I’m using MediaWiki 1.10, MySQL Essential 5.0.24, and PHP 5.2.3 on a Windows Server 2003 box.

I determined that the Export doc wants to see tags written as ".[theTag]" and used this method to ignore certain aspects of the CSS. It has been largely successful. The only two problems that I had that I've been given the okay to ignore are 1) a toc javascript line that gets included in the conversion and 2) the Apple Wiki tags generated for each imported page. It's a simple process of just cleaning up the pages as we browse and use the new Wiki. The next step will be to figure out how to determine a dynamic template such as the feature available in MediaWiki. It would be nice to have a single page to point to and just simply include a link to it and load it in an iFrame at the bottom of every page we want to include it on. For example, all of our backup-related articles can include a dynamic frame with links to all of the other backup-related articles.
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User profile for user: aaronmarks
aaronmarks
User level: Level 1
50 points

Mar 22, 2008 7:49 PM in response to Chad_C

Why would any of you guys want to move from a great wiki platform like Media Wiki or DokuWiki to Apple's half-assed attempt at a wiki.

I personally use DokuWiki and have tried Apple's wiki on one of my 10.5 servers. I can't believe how limited in features Apple's wiki is and it is incompatible with IE7 and Mozilla Firefox 3 as well which makes it completely impossible for me to deploy. I do enjoy the robust control over permissions and integration with Active Directory that I'm able to achieve with it, but the customizability and problems mentioned above seem like a complete show stopper for any organization IMO.
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User profile for user: Chad_C
Chad_C Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

Mar 26, 2008 6:05 AM in response to aaronmarks

The reasons for my interest in Apple's Wiki include, but are not limited to, the following:
1) search: it WORKS!
2) usability: one doesn't need to learn any syntax to use Apple's wiki, thus facilitating documentation by not throwing up any barriers
3) works out of the box: my job title isn't, nor should it be, "wiki manager"
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Transferring Content from MediaWiki to Apple's Wiki

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