A collection of scripts to help transfer a community from Vanilla to Discourse. May only be useful for me.
You'll want to set three environment variables:
VANILLA_API
—Acquire viahttps://YOUR_VANILLA_SITE/profile/tokens
.DISCOURSE_API
—Acquire viahttps://YOUR_DISCOURSE_SITE/admin/api/keys
.DISCOURSE_USER
You'll also want at least one existing Vanilla site and one Discourse site you want move to. (Now some of these scripts aren't technically related to Vanilla at all and are just handy for adjusting Discourse configuration.)
Vanilla allows any level of category/forum nesting. Discourse only allows one. That is to say, each Discourse category my have up to one parent and no category with children may have a parent. It's a dystopian (or utopian, depending on your point of view) grandparent-less existence. It's also a lot simpler.
The idea behind this script is to pick one level to be the top level and stuff all categories anywhere beneath that level to be direct children. So if in Vanilla you have:
- Top level!
- Next level
- Under leveled
- Sublevel
- Under leveled
- Next level
Then in Discourse, you could set the main depth to be 2 and get:
- Top level!
- Next level
- Under leveled
- Sublevel
$ tier_categories.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST -t 2
This does the reverse of tier_categories.rb
. It goes through all the
Discourse categories that have parents and makes them top-level. This
might be necessary if you, I don't know, screw up the previous
script. (Not that I would know. 8-)
$ flatten_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST
I have a big list of schools that I need to organize. The logical first step is to use the alphabet, which is already a known sorting method. For the purposes of this script, I remove "University of " while sorting. This could be made general, but I'm gonna be lazy for now. (If this seems like a useful script for your Discourse instance, please let me know and I'll parameterize this script.)
$ alpha_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST
The solution our forums had for the large number of schools is to
alphabetize under categories named A through W and X-Y-Z. Those aren't
real categories with discussions, but just organizing
pseudo-categories. So I want to delete them. (Fun fact: the script was
originally called kill_cats.rb
, but that started to make
flatten_cats.rb
feel uncomfortable.)
$ delete_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST
People online love their avatars. How you chose to represent yourself matters a great deal. Our import didn't bring over avatars from Vanilla, so I wrote this post-processing script. It ignores default avatars.
$ transfer_avatars.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST
This script transfers avatars and also a few other things. It makes moderators on Vanilla also moderators on Discourse. It also maps people to the appropriate trust level based on rank:
Rank | Trust Level |
---|---|
New Member | 0 |
Junior Member | 1 |
Member | 2 |
Senior Member | 3 |
$ update_users.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST [-r ROLE_ID] [-u USER_COUNT]
At the moment, moderators can't see a list of warnings they way they can suspensions. This script creates the most bare-boned report of a user's warnings. For obvious reason, this should only be shown to staff (moderators+admins). How many warnings and the title of those warnings shouldn't be broadcast to other users. The links themselves can be seen by staff and the user who has been warned. (And this API will fail unless the API key is authorized to get this data.)
$ show_warings.rb DISCOURSE_HOST USERNAME
To see the script in action, redirect the output to a file (> username.html
) and open it in a browser ($ open username.html
). I
could use a lot more styling that I'm not planning on doing because
I'm unqualified.
When we import data all the posts are wiped out, which means I need to repost a few announcements and the banner. This should really be made more general. Also, making a post a banner isn't working at the moment.
$ post_announcements.rb DISCOURSE_HOST
Once you have the categories to your liking on an instance of
Discourse, you might want to copy them to a new instance. To do this,
download the categories.json
file from the existing site:
https://DISCOURSE_HOST/categories.json
.
$ upload_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST
This script updates random setting to the way I need them on my site. Probably not useful for you without edits. :-(
$ update_settings.rb DISCOURSE_HOST