SID-01672: Migrating Content From Old Twiki to New Twiki?

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	5.1.4	Perl version:	5.10.1, mod_perl 2.0.4
Category:	CategoryLocalization	Server OS:	RHEL 6.1	Last update:	12 years ago

I've read the TWikiUpgradeGuide but I couldn't find the answer to my question.

I've been given the task of upgrading a Twiki 4.1.x site to 5.1.4. Doing this includes both copying existing content to the new Twiki and also copying the old look and feel, including various customizations to page layouts. Copying the content was trivial but I couldn't figure out a way to copy the look and feel unless I empties the following directories in the new site, and replaced them with the files from the old site.

./pub/TWiki ./pub/Main ./templates ./data/TWiki ./data/Main

This worked, but I'm worried that the result is a mishmash old old and new Twiki code.

I didn't create the old Twiki but I'm wondering if it was done correctly in the sense of separating the distribution from locally created and/or modified files. What is the correct way to do this?

Thanks,

-- Jon Forrest - 2013-04-01

Discussion and Answer

I do not recommend mixing old and new templates & skins. There is a good chance that your TWiki will not function properly, and you will not get the new features, such as read-only skin mode.

If you have been using the PatternSkin you can simply enable it, it ships with the latest TWiki. If you have done customizations to the skin I recommend to redo them. Redo them in a way that allows you minimum upgrade issues later on. Do that by creating your own skin that overloads some of the PatternSkin and/or TopMenuSkin. Details at PatternSkinCustomization.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2013-04-01

I agree with you 100% but it might be too late because I don't know how to detect our local modifications. Running diff against the old site will show many differences that are due to new versions of existing files.

Redoing customizations seems risky or at least time consuming.

It would be nice if there were a location that all local modifications went in (kind of like copy-on-write) so it would be easy to see at a glance what files were changed.

-- Jon Forrest - 2013-04-01

You can compare to a previous release, download the version you have from TWikiProductionRelease.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2013-04-01

That's a good idea! I'll try it.

-- Jon Forrest - 2013-04-01

Peter, your idea worked great, and now I see exactly which files have been modified. I'm wondering now what the best way would be to get the modified content into my 5.1.4 Twiki.

All the modified files are .txt files, as you'd expect. I'm thinking that maybe I could use rcs to checkout the version of a file from the 5.1.4 distro, make that change to the .txt file, and then check the change back in. In other words, I wouldn't use Twiki itself to make the changes. In fact, using 'diff -e', I could probably come up with a script to make all the changes.

What do you think of this approach? Can you think of any problems?

Thanks, Jon

-- Jon Forrest - 2013-04-04

Modifications in TWiki web: If the modifications where in TWiki.TWikiPreferences I recommend to do them in Main.TWikiPreferences. If the modifications were to skin fragments I recommend doing them in a new skin that overload as needed. If you want to modify plugin settings, do that in Main.TWikiPreferences, not the plugin topic. May be I miss something, but I don't see another reason to change content in the TWiki web.

Modifications in Main web: Manually merge user profile form & header customization.

Other webs: Just copy content over. Copy Web* system topics over from the _default web.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2013-04-05

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