MediaWikiToFoswikiAddOn

MediaWiki 2 Foswiki Conversion Tool

Introduction

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This is a commandline tool to import MediaWiki pages and images to Foswiki. It processes a MediaWiki XML dump to extract the pages and thus does not need a database access once the dump was created.

The conversion tool takes care of almost all peculiarities of MediaWiki and Foswiki. It does not map MediaWiki's category system onto Foswiki as long as Foswiki lacks a standard category system. There are however many ways to implement categories in Foswiki, one of which is the upcomming ClassificationPlugin which implements true hierarchies and semantic predicates to query categories and topics within. The mediawiki2foswiki tool allows to map the MediaWiki categories onto any Foswiki category system like the mentioned one using a plugin interface that comes with the conversion tool.

One notion of caution: in general the conversion tool is able to convert the wiki markup dialects. However, the MediaWiki's template mechanism, comparable to Foswiki's parametrized INCLUDE statement does not match. The reason is burried in the different parsing priorities within both parsers: while MediaWiki parses left-to-right, Foswiki does also parser inside-out, which means parameters to INCLUDE are evaluate before making the inclusion. The opposite is the case in MediaWiki. In a way MediaWiki's tempaltes are called "by reference" (passing the unparsed parameters) while Foswiki evaluates INCLUDE passing parameters "by value". This means, that WikiApplications written for MediaWiki won't be translatable to WikiApplications easily by this tool.

Documentation

The conversion tool is in <path-to-your-foswiki>/tools/mediawiki2foswiki.

Synopsis

       mediawiki2foswiki
             --file <dumpfile>
             [--<debug>]
             [--<defaultweb> <webname>]
             [--<dry>]
             [--<exclude> <regex>]
             [--<help>]
             [--<images> <path>]
             [--<include> <regex>]
             [--<language> <language code>]
             [--<match> <regex>]
             [--<max> <number>]
             [--<namespace> <name>]
             [--<plugin> <perlfile>]
             [--<topicmap> <fromTopic1=toTopic1,fromTopic2=toTopic2,...>]
             [--<web> <target web>]
             [--<webmap> <fromWeb1=toWeb1,fromWeb2=toWeb2,...>

Example call

       mediawiki2foswiki
             --file dump.xml
             --web MediaWiki
             --language de
             --topicmap 'Hauptseite=WebHome,Spezial.Allpages=WebTopicList'
             --images /var/www/mediawiki/images
             --defaultweb _mediawiki_default
             --plugin MyConversionPlugin
             --exclude '^(MediaWiki|Bild|Kategorie):'

This reads the file dump.xml, and creats a web called MediaWiki in our current installation (see Setup). In this example, the source content is German. The pages "Hauptseite" will be stored in the the WebHome topic. The Special.Allpages page will be stored in WebTopicList". Images are taken from the images subdirectory of our MediaWiki installation at /var/www/mediawiki. We prepared a template web called _mediawiki_defaul that will be used when creating webs. We have some perl code in MyConversionPlugin.pm that defines some custom conversions only of relevance for our own content. Source pages that match the regular expression MediaWiki|Bild|Kategorie will be excluded from the translation process.

Options

The only mandatory option is the name of the MediaWiki dump file from which content is extracted. Before you start extracting large amount of data you should test the conversion result by using the -debug, -dry and -max.

more docu please

Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server.

Open configure, and open the "Extensions" section. Use "Find More Extensions" to get a list of available extensions. Select "Install".

If you have any problems, or if the extension isn't available in configure, then you can still install manually from the command-line. See http://foswiki.org/Support/ManuallyInstallingExtensions for more help.

Contrib Info

Sponsored by

Author:	Michael Daum
Copyright ©:	2006-2009, Michael Daum http://michaeldaumconsulting.com
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Release:	v2.0
Version:	2536 (2009-02-19)
Change History:
19 Feb 2009	converted to foswiki extension
20 Jul 2007	initial release
Dependencies:	None
Contrib Home:	Foswiki:Extensions/MediaWikiToFoswikiContrib