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

[Meher Anand]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 2:26 AM, Meher Anand <meheranandk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 2) Would you like to transfer unpublished articles?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
>

I realized that I might not have been very clear in point 1 of my profile.
The installation is of Wordpress MU. Each blog on the installation is a
personal webpage of each faculty member and only the LDAP owner of a blog
can edit it. Wordpress was preferred by us over CMS such as Joomla and
Drupal due to its excellent UI and the simplicity of posting material on the
page.

Regards.

Meher Anand
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology
Nagpur, India