State of OSN5 for May 12th, 2013
Since the news that I will be attending Drupalcon stuck over a week ago, I've lost the thread of what's going on with OSNews 5. Every night since then has been spent either in abject exhaustion, or in a frenzy of worry and anticipation. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this happened. It is, however, frustrating and the interruption a terrible detriment to my productivity.
So where *are* we with OSN5?
At this moment, the entire codebase has been ported to migrate.module, and the old migration code relegated to the 1.x branch. The new 2.x code is actually better than my from-scratch effort in that is deals with several edge cases better, fixes formatting, and a number of other fixes. The last piece of content to migrate that I know of was comment votes. This feature was never implemented in the 1.x code, but was a surprisingly easy to do using the VotingAPI destination class provided by the migrate_extras module. While there are some descrepencies in the comment scoring from the mods table compared to the comments.score column, I've been assured I should always rely on the mods table instead. I'm unsure how comfortable I am with this, but perhaps it doesn't matter.
Other than a few tweaks, checks, and bug squashing, the migration part of OSN5 is done. I can say with certainty that we can import content from the old site into the new one without a huge problem. There are, however a few lingering issues I do want to consider before putting down the migration code for good.
- Should registered submitters be node authors? Right now, any content that was submitted by a registered OSNews user is listed under the "submitter" field. The editor that posted the content to the site is listed as the post author. This works, but I have to wonder if it would be better to switch that around. If a registered user submits a post, why shouldn't they be listed as the post author? The biggest reason may be the nature of what's posted. While OSNews does have the occasional full post submitted to the site, the majority of the posts are submitted merely as links. One of the editors must pick up the link and turn it into a post. This isn't a decision I really can make myself. I need to put it in front of others involved with the content and see what they think.
- Podcasts have yet to be imported. There's been some thought here that it isn't worth keeping these. I disagree with that. Importing podcasts should be fairly easy using the Media destination provided by migrate_extras. A media field with jPlayer would allow podcasts to be played on the site easily. The only sticky point is having a download of the podcasts in the first place. I don't believe Migrate will do that for me, so I would need to download the files as part of the script, or manually.
- Existing URL aliases could be preserved. For the most part, I've figured out how the existing URLs are generated. Our new URL scheme also allows the existing URLs to overlap pretty easily. The only problem is writing the code necessary to make that possible.
