FeedBurner and e107 integration

In the context of my plan to move an e107-based website to WordPress, I need to take care of my RSS subscribers. To let people (and search engines) get my content via old URLs, I will use Apache redirections to do this transparently and permanently. My final goal is to have a WordPress website with all RSS feeds (blog posts and comments) managed by FeedBurner, to gather statistics about my audience.

Actually there is plenty of feeds format available in e107 (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF) and one feed can be accessed through multiple URLs. We will reduce this incredible mess by using RSS 2.0 feeds only and redirect all others to it.

First, check that the e107 RSS feed plugin is activated. Then create an account on FeedBurner and setup there two feeds, one for your website’s news and another one for comments. Based on default e107 parameters, your news feed URL is like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1.2 and comments feed like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5.2.

Then, create (or edit) the http://www.my-domain.com/.htaccess file, and add following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(5|Comments)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments? [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(1|News|.*)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed? [R=301,L]

This code is inspired by the one written by Mike Atlas, who had a similar issue and wanted to outsource his e107 forum RSS feeds to FeedBurner.

The first rewrite rule will redirect all URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5 or http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?Comments to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments.

The second rewrite rule will redirect all other URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php (including http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1 and http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?News) to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed.

That’s all ! Thanks to this server-side redirection, nobody will notice that the feeds have moved and no subscriber will be bothered to update their aggregator.

In my case, the only remaining task to do is to move my e107 website to WordPress then install FeedSmith plugin. But that’s another story… ;)

e107 to WordPress v0.8: import images and preferences

The 8th version of my e107 to WordPress import script is out ! This version is quite special because this is the first one that support all features I planned to implement in the road map I write for the first alpha release.

Here is the changelog:

  • Import images embedded in e107 news and custom pages,
  • Import e107 site preferences (like site name and description),
  • Better import of user profile data,
  • An existing user on the blog can be detected and updated automatically,
  • Fix the profanity filter bug,
  • Tested with latest WordPress 2.1.3.

Sapphire style for K2 WordPress theme

Sapphire custom style for K2 WordPress Theme

Yesterday I’ve build a new K2 style based on the legacy Sapphire 1.0 WordPress theme by Michael Martine. This is the result of my love to the blue bend of Sapphire and the versatility of K2.

As you can see in the footer of that blog, I’m using my Sapphire 0.1 style right now. So if you like the look and feel of that blog, don’t ask yourself and download Sapphire 0.1 for for K2 !

To install it, unzip the archive to your /wp-content/themes/k2/styles/ folder.

e107 to WordPress v0.7: support Categories and Private Pages

e107 to WordPress import plugin v0.7: News and Categories Imported screenshot I’ve released a new version of my e107 migration script for WordPress. This release is numbered v0.7.

Here is the change-log:

  • Import e107 news categories.
  • Mails can be sent to each user to warn them about their new password. This is the only solution I found to fix the issue about reseted passwords.
  • Thanks to the 2.1 branch of WordPress, static pages can be set as private. This version of my script use this feature.
  • Private pages also deprecate the questions asked to the user when importing pages. So I deleted those parameters (“Warning 2” on the screenshot) to make the import process easier.
  • Embedded e107 code updated from v0.7.8.
  • Tested with WordPress 2.1.2.
  • Some little UI imporvements (to match admin UI consistency).

Because of its de-facto standard status, my import script is now packaged as a .zip file. It can be downloaded from my Linux Scripts section.

Repository Moved thanks to Apache and 301 Redirections

Since the creation of my personal Mandriva repository (10 months ago) the number of my RPMs did not cease to increase. Currently all RPMs and SRPMs from 2006.0 and 2007.0 take 383MiB of space.

So I decided to move the http://kev.coolcavemen.com/static/repository folder to http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository, which is a 10GiB (yes, ten gibibyte, this is not a typo) free web space offered by Free, my ISP.

To do this smoothly, I’ve just set up a generic 301 redirection thanks to Apache. This is the only line I added to my root .htaccess file to enable this:

Redirect permanent /static/repository http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository

This move will normally be completely silent for you. So please, let me now if something bad happend while you play with my repository.