UI for running migrations

I'm not using Drupal 7 (I'm on D6) but the UI module does not provide a way to "use" migrate. It only provides an administrative overview. To actually run migrations you must use drush commands. If you do drush help you will see the migrate commands available. To see the status of migrations: drush migrate-status. To run an import: drush migrate-import ImportClassName. You can see examples of this in the beer.inc file included in the Migrate Examples module.

You may want to make a note on the module page that it needs drush. That's a huge chunk of useful info you left out there.

Migrate 1.x provided a functional UI that allowed migrations to be set up, run, and re-run through the UI. I love Drush and it has made many things much quicker for me, but for a straightforward migration I'm not convinced that it would be quicker. More important, perhaps, is the barrier that has been raised apparently quite deliberately by the maintainers, or at least whoever wrote this part of the documentation:

It is important to recognize that the Migrate module is a developer's tool - if you do not have object-oriented programming skills in PHP, this module is not for you.

I'd be interested to know more about why this decision was taken. Migrate 1.x was perfectly usable without "object-oriented programming skills in PHP". With a re-write from the ground up, I can understand not implementing this as a first priority but it would appear nonetheless to be significant regression. Is there no possibility of continuing to provide a UI for those who choose to use it with Migrate? Hence this feature request.

If the maintainers are not interested in this feature request, please at least consider a) specifically stating on the project page that this functionality has been removed in the movement from 1.x to 2.x, as it resulted for me in considerable confusion when upgrading via Drush which wasn't resolved by visiting the project page, and b) pointing potential 6.x users to the fact that they could still find this functionality in the 1.x branch if they wanted it.

Subscribing.
(and going back to 1.x for now, as I simply need to quickly import some stuff the way it used to work..)

First off, the Migrate module's primary purpose is supporting large, complex migration projects, and the changes for V2 were aimed at better providing this support:

1. The general architecture of V1 was not flexible enough, particularly in its dependence on Table Wizard and Views and the difficulty in tweaking the logic for particular projects. The object-oriented approach, where any method can be overridden, with sources and destinations fully pluggable and handler classes applied at key points, addresses this.

2. In complex migration projects, it's essential that the configuration (i.e., the field mappings) be subject to source control - i.e., be instantiated in code. The configuration is developed and debugged in a development environment, and checked into the repository, from which it can be deployed to QA and ultimately production environments. A UI for field mappings would need to function as a code generator - certainly not impossible, but that represents a significant sub-project.

3. Drush is more efficient, and far more reliable, as a means of running heavy-duty processes like migrations than Batch API.

Our time on the migrate module right now is focused on getting the fundamental architecture for complex migrations right and getting 2.0 released soon - UI support for simple migrations is secondary and not in our near-term plans. Batch API support for running migrations shouldn't be that difficult and could come in 2.1, but support for defining mappings through the UI is not something we're likely to produce ourselves. If someone wants to tackle that (probably best as a module of its own), the Migrate V2 API should be flexible enough to support this, and we'd be happy to provide support for that development in the issue queue.

Migrate V2 is very different from Migrate V1, and perhaps in retrospect should have been a separate Drupal project so as to better set expectations - but here we are.

@mikeryan thanks for explaining it so detailed, helped me understanding the changes way better!

I'm a non-technical user that definitely misses the UI that was built into 1.x. Not seeing it in 2.x took me by surprise, and has led to some embarrassment on a project deadline. Subscribing to see when this feature will become available.

Suscribe

Let's split out the two aspects of the UI, running migrations (which should be doable for 2.1) and defining migrations (which would be a major project of its own).

Subscribe.

See also #1123538: UI for defining migrations.

Committed for D7; D6 is a bit trickier since it doesn't have the builtin tableselect support.

Wow, great. Had no idea this was in progress. Interested parties can see http://drupalcode.org/project/migrate.git/commit/4e33838 for the diff.

FYI, tableselect for D6 is at http://drupal.org/project/elements. Not sure if it changed much since then.

Perhaps the UI should have an Advanced options fieldset where we let folks add an idlist or an itemLimit.

Thanks, was starting to work on stealing the D6 node admin code for it, but will take a look at the elements module.

Yes, there are a few options I can think of (well, any arguments the drush commands take), but let's take those on under their own issues in the queue. My priority right now is getting the basic functionality in for Migrate 2.1.

Elements works nicely, thanks!