Merged Migrating from NING.com

I'm moving my site off NING and need to import the message board posts into Kunena. I have an xml file that was supplied by NING with all the posts but need to figure a way to import rather than cutting and pasting a few thousand posts, one at a time. Any ideas?

Hello,

It's not possible to import into kunena, kunena and the system ning are differents so you need to make adaptations or create a php script to do that.

G'day, Hinson. I don't know a lot about NING.com (the messages in this forum are quite hard to locate) and the only previous reference I found to this site/network was an unanswered question written a long time ago: Can someone help us I want to add a kunena forum to our Ning website . So without any helpful background it's going to be difficult finding help for you.

I'm going to make a few assumptions and, perhaps you can correct any errors that I make, but it seems like NING.com is one of those "three-clicks-and-you've-created-a-website" sites. Is that about the size of it? After spending only a couple of minutes at their site, it looks similar to a cross between Facebook and Windows Live Spaces: you sign up, you're allocated an area to manage/play with, and you get a couple of freebie "goodies" (like a calendar or a forum) into the bargain. I'm not intending to pass any value judgement on these kinds of sites, but it's not what most of us would call a real website. It's a pre-packaged web-based solution for people who want to create their own web presence without the hassles of having to find a webhost or obtain their own domain name.

The problem with these "three-clicks-and-you've-created-a-website" sites is that they use their own proprietary technology that is not, generally, made available to the public. Further, the data is actually owned by them - not by you - and you may have no right to export the data from their systems. Most of this information should be defined in their "Terms of Use". You'll have to read it to see what rights you have in this regard.

If it were possible for NING.com to provide you with a copy of your forum data (undoubtedly this is the first question that you need to ask them) the data format may not easily translate into either MySQL terms or a form that's easily adaptable to Kunena.

This leaves you with three options:

1. Laboriously copy/paste the existing contents of your NING.com forum discussions and put them into your new Joomla/Kunena website;
2. Ask NING.com if they have a way of converting your forum data into a form that can be imported into a MySQL database and figure out how to map the data fields into Kunena's database structure (or pay someone to do this "migration" for you); or
3. Close the NING.com forum, put a signpost to show where your site has moved to, and leave it as an archive.

I know which of those options I would choose!

Moving your user base to another platform gives you a wonderful opportunity to clear out a lot of the "dead wood". Some of the discussions that you enjoyed in days gone by will have lost their appeal or they're no longer topical. Some of your users may have lost interest or they've moved on. Some of your users may not want to follow you and you've also got new opportunities to broaden your user base, too! So, rather than cling to ancient relics, perhaps you should look at this as a way of being able to start again ... and do it better!

Sozzled; thank you for posting such a detailed reply and I do apologize for not acknowledging sooner. I had neglected to 'subscribe' to the thread and just now saw it.

You pretty much nailed the description of NING. I'm not at all knowledgeable about coding/scripting for websites. I know how to do the frontend/backend management (worked for AOL for almost 20 years)and have picked up a bit of HTML and CSS along the way but PHP, ASP, Java and the rest are out of my league.

Having said that; my site on NING was a genealogy site with about 400 members. While much of the content posted by members was general chit-chat, the majority was genealogy data that is extremely valuable to the site. If all else fails, I will have to go with your number one suggestion and do a cut and paste for each post that I wish to keep.

However, I would rather figure out some method of importing. I found that an RSS reader would read an XML file and that actually works fairly well. I can read the file, copy and past the whole thing into an archive post on the forum. Unfortunately, when someone does a search, it brings up that whole post rather then the individual portion that includes the data they are looking for.

I can convert the file to excel or .cs but still have not found a way to use the original XML or either of those to post the individual posts to Kunena or to get it into the MySQL database.

xillibit; thank you for your comments. Have no idea how to create a PHP script so I'll have to keep looking or start cut and pasting

Hinson wrote:

xillibit; thank you for your comments. Have no idea how to create a PHP script so I'll have to keep looking or start cut and pasting

I think you will find practically nothing about this, but you can check for a freelancer or someone interested to do it.