Tag Archives: e107

e107 Importer plugin for WordPress v1.4 released !

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I just released the version 1.4 of my e107 Importer plugin for WordPress.

This is a special release as it ends the active development cycle. I officially declare this plugin unmaintained. I don’t plan to work on it again.

The 1.4 will be the last version. Unless you send me code contribution, you’ll not see a 1.5 version.

The reason behind this decision is simple and straightforward: I’ve recently migrated my last e107 website to WordPress. Now that e107 is no longer part of my life, I have no interest in spending time and energy working on this plugin.

So if you plan to get rid of your e107 sites in favor of WordPress, do the migration now, as the plugin will self-deteriorate as WordPress API gets updated.

Cool Cavemen WebDesign Retrospective

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Here is a collection of all themes I created for the Cool Cavemen website over the years.

Before settling on its current name, the Cool Cavemen project was referred to by its members as The Ultimate Band (talk about rock-star egos…). Here is a screenshot of the theme I did for e107:

In fact the original HTML mockup this theme is based on still exists. It is dated back to November 1st, 2004, which is now the official Cool Cavemen anniversary. The theme above was created two weeks later.

When I created the Cool Cavemen’s site, I choose e107. Back then I perceived it to be the only Open Source PHP-based CMS having the best balance between a clean and a powerful theme engine. That was my opinion before decided to switch to WordPress.

At the end of November ’04, our theme was updated to this:

The header above is based on a photo of a green laser, that was taken by Cool Cavemen’s guitarist.

2005 started with an updated version of the theme, featuring a photo of Cool Cavemen’s first gig. They were only three on stage, our bass player was still drumming at the time:

In February we finally had our official photo featuring all members of the band ! But it was cold outside so we added some fur to keep our website warm:

I spent the next months trying to build my own version of the Holy Grail: a perfect CSS-based 3-columns fluid layout (with a middle column placed in the top of the HTML). This explain Eric Mayer‘s quote in these mockups and the references to the Skidoo Too template:

I never found the Holy Grail, and the tests above remained unseen by the public. Tired by this journey, I never touched the theme again.

Until September 2005 when I updated it to this:

Notice the box in the top of the right column, which was designed to publish a new track every week. The code behind this box is available in another article.

So that was the last major version of the theme. Basically our e107 site looked that way for most of its life.

In November 2005 I attempted to reboot the theme. I made these 3 propositions to the band:

The last one had an interactive header, with tiny sketches showing up on mouse over:

Unfortunately we didn’t found any of these themes matching the Cool Cavemen spirit (whatever that is). If these alternatives were publicly discussed, we decided that no one was going to replace our previous theme.

The final update we made was when our Raw EP was released. We basically applied filters on the header to match Raw’s cover. We also updated our logo to use the one designed for us by QPX:

e107 Importer v1.3 released

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A month after the last one, here is a brand new version of my e107 Importer, numbered 1.3.

This version add loads of polishing and is not far from being feature-complete. I think I’m reaching the end of the active development of this plugin. I don’t see the need to add new features.

I also feel this way because last week, I succeeded in moving to WordPress all news and pages from the old e107′s Cool Cavemen website. I now only need to import all forums to definitively get rid of e107 from my life. At that point, I will declare the plugin no longer active. This mean I will no longer update it, but will still integrate code other developers are willing to contribute.

Before that happen, I will of course release one or two revisions of this plugin in the next few months. But expect bug fixes and tiny enhancements, not big new features.

That being said, here is the changelog of the brand new e107 Importer 1.3:

  • Upgrade embedded e107 code with latest 0.7.25.
  • Redirect imported images to attachments.
  • Purge invalid mapping entries on import.
  • Replace old e107 URLs in content by new WordPress permalinks.
  • Allow both imported and already-existing content to by updated with new permalinks.
  • Let user specify the list of e107 forums to import.
  • Phased imports should work without major problems.

e107 Importer 1.2 is out, with an enhanced BBCode parser.

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Here is a brand new version of my e107 Importer plugin. This release fix lots of nasty bugs. Better, I added an enhanced BBCode parser which try to clean-up what e107′s parser output. This new parser also try to align the final HTML with what WordPress produce by default.

As usual, my plugin is available on the official WordPress plugin directory.

Here is the detailed changelog:

  • Upgrade e107 code to match latest 0.7.25-rc1.
  • Fix variable bleeding when importing items in batches.
  • Add a new way of handling e107 extended news using WordPress’ excerpts.
  • Parse BBCode and replace e107 constants in news excerpt.
  • Use internal WordPress library (kses) to parse HTML in the image upload step.
  • Do not upload the same images more than once.
  • Add a new enhanced BBCode parser on top of the one from e107. Make it the default parser.
  • Each time we alter the original imported content, we create a post revision.

Fixing messed-up encoding in MySQL

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Currently working on my e107 Importer plugin, I was confronted today with badly-encoded data coming from my databases.

e107 migrated to full UTF-8 years ago, but I must have messed the upgrade process at the time. That was my conclusion when I took a close look to my tables: all of them seems to be set to Latin-1 but contain UTF-8 data. Here are screenshots from SQLBuddy (a great light-weight MySQL manager) showing just that:

To fix this, I first tried to use the following command I found on the web:

mysql --database=e107db -B -N -e "SHOW TABLES"  | awk '{print "ALTER TABLE", $1, "CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"}' | mysql --database=e107db

But this doesn’t work, as it not only change the encoding of the table, but also transcode the data inside the table.

Let’s try something else. First, we’ll export the database to a dump file, of which the encoding is forced to Latin-1:

mysqldump -a -c -e --no-create-db --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 --databases 'e107db' > ./e107-data.sql

Now the trick is to change the CHARSET parameter of all CREATE TABLE directives to UTF-8:

sed -i 's/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8/g' ./e107-data.sql

We’ll also change the NAMES directive to force MySQL to handle imported data as UTF-8:

sed -i 's/SET NAMES latin1/SET NAMES utf8/g' ./e107-data.sql

Then we’re free to import the result in a new UTF-8 database:

sed -i 's/USE `e107db`;/#USE `e107db`;/g' ./e107-data.sql
mysql --execute="CREATE DATABASE e107db_new CHARACTER SET=utf8"
mysql --database=e107db_new < ./e107-data.sql

And now, accentuated characters appears as they should in our database, meaning we’ve fixed all the mess ! :)


PS: I found another alternative method (look at the end of the linked page) which consists of temporarily handling TEXT fields as BLOB, to have MySQL treat them as binary content (thus skipping character transcoding). Haven’t tested this but sounds tricky.

e107 Importer 1.1 available !

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A month after the 1.0 release, here is my e107 Importer v1.1 for WordPress !

The biggest new feature is support of e107 forum import to the bbPress WordPress plugin. This plugin is still in alpha and was not released yet. This mean you have to fetch it from its Subversion repository. And be careful to get the recommended version (SVN release 2942).

Because of the experimental status of forum import, the default option of e107 Importer is to not import forums. I decided to include this feature anyway to get feedbacks. So please don’t consider forum import as a highly reliable. It may work for you or may not. And please write detailed bug reports.

Here is a detailed changelog between 1.0 and 1.1:

  • Add import of forums and threads to bbPress WordPress plugin.
  • Parse BBCode and e107 constants in forums and thread.
  • Add forums and threads redirections.
  • Make e107 user import optional. This needs you to set a pre-existing WordPress user that will take ownership of all imported content.
  • Parse BBCode in titles too.
  • Import images embedded in comments and forum threads.
  • Description update of existing users is no longer destructive.
  • Add an entry in the FAQ regarding script ending prematurely.
  • Disable all extra HTML rendering hooks like the one coming from e107 linkwords plugin.
  • Allow news and pages import to be skipped.
  • Add missing news category redirects.
  • Minimal requirement set to WordPress 3.1.
  • Some pages are not tied to a user. In this case, default to the current user.