[wp-hackers] Blog Import/Export Idea - Google Summer of Code 2010

[Meher Anand]

Hi all.

I am currently studying my last semester of Computer Science & Engineering.
I have been using Wordpress heavily for the last 3 years and I am interested
in contributing for it. The Blog Import/Export idea interested me since I
too had faced some issues when I was shifting a blog installation from one
hosting facility to another. Here's the working scenario which I propose:

- User needs to know only the FTP account details. Knowing the database
details is an added plus. The Blog Import Export (BIE) plugin will be
installed only on the new blog. If the user is unaware of the DB details,
BIE will initially download the wp-config file from the remote server and
extract the DB password from it and connect to the database. A check list
will be generated based on both Category and Month-Year and a user can
choose to transfer full or only part of the blog by Category or by
Month-Year.

- User will also be given the following options:
1) Would you like to transfer Media files which are not being used in any of
your articles?
2) Would you like to transfer unpublished articles?

- Once all options are selected, transfers will be done on a post by post
basis i.e. the post and all media referenced by it. This is done so that if
this were a large blog and the transfer were somehow interrupted, atleast
some of the posts will be visible completely with the pictures, documents
and stuff inside the new blog. Also, while the transfer is going on, an AJAX
based status update can be given so that the user is aware of the current
status. It can be of the format, 3 / 140 posts transferred.

- If the transfer were to be interrupted due to some reason, the BIE plugin
can store the user configuration (which posts need to be transferred, FTP
details, DB details etc.) in a separate table in the local database and also
the current state of the transfer. This would help the plugin recover later
on when the transfer would be resumed.

Please review this and let me know if I've missed out on anything.

Also, here's my work related to Wordpress and general PHP coding so far:

1) Faculty pages for my University. Work still in progress and to be
launched soon. Demo link: http://cse.vnit.ac.in/people/ashishtiwari/ . These
blogs are actually meant to be used by faculty as their personal home pages,
so rule 0 is to not make it look like a blog. I had made significant changes
to the code base to remove the concept of comments and side bar etc. Login
is through LDAP. This plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-ldap-login/ helped quite a bit
but didn't satisfy requirements mainly because of multiple DNs being used by
the LDAP server. I had to make significant modifications there so as to
allow use of different DNs based on regular expression matching on
user-input username.
2) Installation and maintenance of http://acm.vnit.ac.in/ and
http://axis.vnit.ac.in/blog.
3) Coding of Institute Alumni website to be launched by the end of this
week. Link - http://alumni.vnit.ac.in/ . Coding was done in CakePHP. This
website has features that are parallel to those offered by Facebook and
Twitter and heavily uses AJAX. JQuery was used for Javascript and AJAX.
4) Currently developing the University website http://beta.vnit.ac.in/ on
CakePHP.

Regards.

Meher Anand
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology