19 March 2013, 0:05

Does anyone have any experience of transferring Elgg blogs to Mahara?  Just wondering how best to go about it.

Thanks

Marion

19 March 2013, 1:40

Hi Marion

If your Elgg account/system is to remain 'live', then you should be able to simply RSS-feed the Elgg blog into a page on Mahara. Effectively using Mahara as a aggregator for a feed on Elgg or elswhere.

If you actually have to migrate content, it may be a little trickier. Not sure about export options in recent versions of Elgg. Of course, there is always 'brute-force' copy-and-paste, though you may lose the original date-time stamps of the blog postings.

Geoff

19 March 2013, 1:50

Thanks, Geoff.  The RSS idea hadn't occurred to me, although I believe our plan is to close Elgg down altogether - might be worth a shot.

Regards

Marion

19 March 2013, 4:00

Yes, if you have a lot of Elgg content, it may just be simpler to keep Elgg' ticking over' for a year or two and RSS-feed 'legacy' blog content into Mahara. Then quietly turn off the Elgg server. That's more-or-less the strategy we adopted when we moved from Elgg to Mahara a few years ago. The relatively few items of 'mission critical' content were copied across or just recreated from scratch.

If required, this also gives you a 'breathing space' to find a more permanent way to migrate content.

In this context, Mahara can import/export content with some other e-Portfolio systems via the Leap2a XML format. AFAIK, Elgg does not use Leap2A, but did implement a similar XML format, ODD (Open Data Definition). So, there *may* be some 'mileage' in 'wrangling' ODD XML export from Elgg into Leap2A import for Mahara.

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Import//Export

http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Export_Interface

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2008/07/31/import-and-export-in-elgg-10-2/

http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/ImportExport

19 March 2013, 4:35

That's really helpful, Geoff, thank you so much.  I've passed that on to our developers.

Regards

Marion