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Migrating DOCman to Joomla! 1.5

29 January 2008


Last week I was at the Dutch Joomla BootCamp, which was organised by our friends from Jira. Johan gave one of his famous unstoppable sessions about the Joomla framework and the MVC model. Jisse talked about templates, and brought along the very first copy of his new book on templates (a rather thorough one I must add, it goes beyond any book on templates I’ve seen — too bad it’s in Dutch only for now).

Finally, I gave a presentation about migrating a Joomla! 1.0 site to Joomla! 1.5, and took the opportunity to announce the migrator plugins for DOCman.

Com_migrator

Com_migrator is a component written by J! Core developer Sam Moffat. The latest version 1.0RC6 was released this week. You install it on your old J!1.0 site (or even Mambo!) and it will take a snapshot of your database. During the installation of J!1.5, you can upload the snapshot (an SQL file). The new site will now contain the contents of the old site. A great feature of com_migrator is the ability to load additional plugins for 3PD extensions, such as DOCman. These plugins expand the snapshot with the data from the extension.
With a little knowledge of phpMyAdmin, you can also use the migrator to copy data from a DOCman installation on a site to an existing J!1.5 installation.

You can download the DOCman migrator plugins at Joomlacode.org, where you can also find the com_migrator component. Extract the plugins’ zip file and read the included README.php file for detailed instructions. We’ve also opened a new forum category where you can discuss DOCman migration.

Good luck migrating!

  • David Peyton

    Thank you for these links. I don’t know what I would have done without reading this post.

  • David Peyton

    Mathias, I have just successfully completed the instructions for DOCMan migration into an existing Joomla 1.5 installation. However, it appears that the plugin doesn’t export the categories!

    I would be immensely grateful if you could look into this for me?

    Perhaps the plugins that are installed tell a story?

    docman.php
    docman_groups.php
    docman_history.php
    docman_licenses.php
    docman_logs.php

    Should there not be a docman_categories.php?

  • David Peyton

    I should perhaps mention that my documents were successfully imported–but show up as within the (orphan) category.

  • Mathias Verraes

    Hi David,

    As stated in the included README.php, the categories are stored in Joomla!’s own #__categories table (which stores content, weblinks, contact, … categories as well). When migrating to an existing J!1.5, these might clash with the categories already defined in the new J! installation. The easiest solution would be to manually recreate the categories. Alternatively, if you know a little about SQL, you could try reassigning ID’s to the categories in the exported SQL file.

  • David Peyton

    Thank you so much for the reply, Mathias. My apologies for wasting your time! :/

  • David Peyton

    Mathias, I’m sorry if I’m posting this in the wrong place; but I just have one more question which I couldn’t find on your forum:

    I imported the DOCman data before recreating my categories. Then after adding a category, the document that is listed under it does not appear within it on the frontend or backend.

    My question is: should I delete the DOCman SQL data in the fresh 1.5 installation and create categories before importing the 1.0.x DOCman data?

    Regards,
    David

  • Laurens Vandeput

    Hi David,

    Would it be possible to continue this conversation on the forums? That way, other users who are experiencing the same problem can follow this up as well.

    Thanks,
    Laurens

  • David Peyton

    I will gladly do that, Laurens.

    I attempted to register an account on your forum, but just got sent in a loop back to the registration page (in both IE and FF):

    http://forum.joomlatools.org/ucp.php?mode=register

    I will try deleting the DOCman SQL data in the fresh 1.5 installation and create categories before importing the 1.0.x DOCman data. Then I will attempt to register again.

    Regards,
    David

  • Mathias Verraes

    We moved to a new server and we’ve got an issue with forum registration right now. We’ll fix it asap.

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