Anyone supporting this plugin – help w/ discussions

The guide I gave above worked for me. I’ve refined it a bit since then and can now perform a near-total import (except for the elements the plugin isn’t designed to import). Only one problem remains for me–replies to blog posts don’t import correctly. More specifically, they import but wind up attached to the wrong posts or not at all. Weird. Everything else, including all forum threads, members, events, etc., come in just fine.

For me, I didn’t have to edit the JSON files, although I did have to rename one.

I haven’t put up my refined guide yet because I haven’t solved the blog reply issue. For me, that’s a very minor concern and I don’t know if I’m going to spend much time on that. Let me know if you’d like to me to post it and I will, though.

Hi Keith, thanks for your reply.

I tried your suggestion and it didn’t seem to work for me. But I have been playing around with code for so long that I have decided to do a fresh download of content from NING Archiver and try again.

I will then setup fresh install of WordPress/Buddypress and only add Import from Ning and then try import (and hope for the best haha!)

Just one question, someone reported that whilst importing the plugin sent out emails to members about activity from a while ago as it was added – did that happen for you? I am hoping it will not do that as it will drive the members mad as there is a lot!

Personally, I am not too bothered about the blog issue. I could potentially manually move/add that content overtime… It’s just the group discussions which is my main priority as there is a lot of content there that I can not afford to not import ?? If I can get the members, groups, groups discussions, discussions, pages and blogs (with or without comments) I will be so relieved.

Yes, the first two times I tried to use the plugin for Ning import, all of my members got emails! And they all wondered if the site had gotten hacked, etc. Apparently, the default setting for new members in BuddyPress is to send them an email notification when there is an update on their account. People have published various hacks to correct that but there is a much better workaround:

Do this operation on a local install, just as I recommended.

Install your site on a local server using XAMPP, etc., and do the operation there. Then you won’t have the email problem.

It’s just the group discussions which is my main priority as there is a lot of content there that I can not afford to not import ?? If I can get the members, groups, groups discussions, discussions, pages and blogs (with or without comments) I will be so relieved.

I did get all of that. As I said earlier, I don’t know if there is something special about my forum that made it importable but, barring that, this procedure should work. I don’t know enough about what’s going on in the process to know which of my above steps you can vary from. I wish I did! All I can say at this point is they should be followed to the letter. When I was done, I had a fully functional site with the latest versions of WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress.

I’ll clean up my revised steps and post them later today.

Thank you so much for your time Keith, much appreciated.

I have never used anything like XAMPP before but that will be my next step. I will install that and then install the site on it and try again.

I have a fresh download of the content now so it will hopefully be nice and clean.

I will let you know how it goes. Thank you again.

@westyalf

Please see this post: How I got Import From Ning to work for me

Thank you Keith!!

I have started the import… Things seem to be progressing more than ever before. But I keep getting stuck on the same bit in the discussions import with this fatal error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress\wp-includes\class-http.php on line 1312

I keep refreshing but it seems to stop at the same place with that error? Is it a case of keep refreshing and eventually it will move forward?

Update- I have changed the max execution time in php.ini and things are moving forward again… I’ll update again soon

I’m crossing my fingers!

I am getting ready to do an import using nearly the same setup Rossen described above (BuddyPress 1.9 w/WP 3.7.1) but I have a couple of questions.

1) I already have some registered users who transfered over to the new site, will this delete them?

2) I already installed bbpress on the site – can I just deactivate it while I do the import, or do I need to completely delete it?

3) The component I want to activate, is it the one described as “Group Forums – Buddypress forus are retired – use bbpress”?

4) How do you move the old discussions to bbpress? Is there an importer that does this once you reinstall/reactivate bbpress?

Thanks for any help you guys can provide!

Hi Keith here is my progress update!

I completed your steps and it imported the majority of the data – I am so thankful for your help!!

It missed about a 100 or so off the discussions but the fact it imported so much I don’t mind that.

So everything looks good up to the point where I upgrade Buddypress. I tested the groups and the forum topics are there correctly.
The problem I have is when I try to migrate to BBPress… Once I complete this process, I go back to the groups and the forum posts are not there ??

How important is it to upgrade to BBPress? Could I stay with the old version of forums purely for the fact it has everything in the right place haha!

Just out of curiosity… Are you using any or do you know of any solutions for importing the photos/videos? I am happy to do it manually.

What do you think is the best plugin solution to allow members to be able to upload photos and videos the way they did in Ning?

Thank you again Keith!! If anyone is trying this process, I recommend following Keith’s guide exactly. This is the furthest progress I have made in months.

I wanted to thank Xaviote for his detailed instructions above. It fixed my import problem! Thank you sir.

My only problem now is that the import of discussions is taking place 10 at a time… and I have 1400 discussions! I need to hit “continue” every 10 discussions. Any way to speed that up?

Here are my final conclusions.

The plugin tool works wonderful! It fails only when dealing with wrongly formatted *.json archives from Ning. What’s worse, a successful export from Ning is totally random! E.g. one day ning-discussion-local.json is broken, another day that one is fine but ning-pages-local.json is broken etc. On top of that, they are broken in different ways.

The plugin already tries to fix some of the common mistakes in the files but doesn’t always succeed. So…

1) Before you start, make sure the archives you got out of Ning are ‘parsable’, i.e. run the following script in the folder with the exported files:

$fix-ning.sh
——

#!/bin/sh

for file in *.json; do
  sed -i -e 's/^(//' $file
  sed -i -e 's/)$//' $file
  sed -i -e 's/}{/},{/g' $file
  sed -i -e 's/}]{/},{/g' $file
  sed -i -e 's/}]]$/}]/' $file
done

——-

This is actually what the plugin also does internally, except for the last substitution, which I had to use on one of my files.

Then, check whether the ‘fixed’ json-s are really fixed with

$ for x in *json; do cat $x | python -mjson.tool > /dev/null; done

The above command should not produce an error.

If you were not successful, wait 24h and do another export of the Ning data while keeping fingers crossed that this time the archive is broken in a ‘fixable’ way.

2) If you have well-formatted archives:

* Install wordpress 3.8.1 as usual
* Install “the events calendar” plugin
* Install import-from-ning plugin
* Install buddy press 1.9.2 plugin + activate
* Scroll to the bottom and click “Go to BuddyPress settings page”
– enable “Friend Connections”
– enable “Private messaging”
– enable “Site Tracking”
– enable “User Groups”
– Click on the “Pages” tab and then “Update permalinks” (for them to work you need to have set in the apache configuration file for the website
“AllowOverride All
Options FollowSymlinks”)
– click on “Retired” tab and then select “Group Forums”
– Click on “Settings” and then enable “Allow activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts”
– Click on “Forums” and the “Install Group Forums” (* Don’t install bbPress for now)

* Put the archive in wp-content/ning-files, make sure the permissions are correct, i.e. the web server can read them. E.g.
$ chown www-data:www-data -R * ning-files

* Activate the import-from-ning plugin and start the import.

*** If you have user names with non-ascii characters, bp_functions.php will set by default the usernames to “unnamed” with extra number after. If you prefer, change that to use the user’s email address:

i.e change

` if ( empty( $username ) )
$username = ‘unnamed’;`

to

`if ( empty( $username ) ) {
if ( empty( $email ) )
$username = ‘unnamed’;
else
$username = $email;
}`

3) After the successful import you can migrate the retired group forums to the new forums as explained here:
https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/guides/migrating-from-old-forums-to-bbpress-2/

Hope that helps!

Just wanted to add some input to this discussion. After many a headache from NING I have finally found that what everyone mentions above to all be correct.

It seems like the main problems with Nings JSON files are that they are never formatted correctly. The best way that I have found to fix this problem is to use a simple tool found here https://codebeautify.org/view/jsonviewer

You will probably be given an error on line one because the json file starts with something like this ([ this isn’t valid json but is what the importer will use so you will have to replace it later.

If you receive an error for line 1 and the your json file starts off with what is mentioned above simplete replace those two characters with something like this { "test": [ . Now your json should be able to be parsed and the parser will keep showing your errors throughout the files.

The errors I was receiving were always between each object. Usually where we need },{ I would have }{ or even }]{

Simply going through the list of problems and fixing them I finally made it to the end of the file where I needed to replace }]) with }]}

I can then click the Beautify button which will create json file that is atleast readable. I this point I uploaded the file back to the server but the importer did not recognize it. I figured it had something to do with the beginning and end of the file so I went in and changed the beginning of the file from { "test": [ back to ([ and the end of the file }]} back to }]).

The importer then finally rand and parsed the entire file. It did stop once and give me a weird wordpress error saying email already in use so I opened the json file and since I now can actually read the file I simply erased the object that was causing the problem. I figure if one thngs out off the 130,000 line file isn’t transferred I am perfectly satisfied in that happening.

Hope this helps anyone. I do have one question for someone here though. Has anyone been able to get friendships to transfer over correctly from ning into buddypress? If so, what file is this handled in and in what part of the import process is it done?