By natefollmer on

I'm sorry, I know this is asked a lot, but I have a few ideas and wondered if someone could give me some guidance on which solution would probably be best/fastest.

Little backstory: Client has a Drupal 6 website. The client and myself only have access to the Drupal end of things (no FTP or Database access). So it's very limiting on what I can do from that end (can't even install new modules), Backup and Restore is installed though, so I was able to get a database copy with that. I created a Drupal 6 site on my home server, updated it to 7.14, then imported that copy into my 7.14 site I built for the client on a dedicated server.

The site is now ready to go live, but I need to get the forum posts that occurred since I exported the database (about a month ago). Here were my thoughts on how to do this:

- Use Node export, get the forum 'topics' then just get the comment table from the database and override the current comment table on the 'new' site. I don't think this will be very fast though, as Node Export doesn't recommend mass export/imports.

- Manually search the database myself and pull out the forum posts that have occurred since I last exported. I'm having trouble figuring out how to tell what is a 'forum post' node though? Once I figure that out, I planned on just inserting these rows into the existing table. I know there is a few different tables a node uses, so if someone could point me in the direction of a forum post node structure, that'd be awesome.

At this point, I've made too many changes to other nodes to warrant overriding every 'node' type in the database, so I think these are my only two options? Anyone else have any better ideas? I'd like to do this as fast as possible (don't we all), but don't mind doing things through the database (I'm not an expert with SQL, but I know enough from my years of C++ to be dangerous).

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

I'd put the prod site in maintenance mode to stop any new content from being added.

I'd then get another copy of the DB
I'd update that to Drupal 7
then I'd export the DB again and do file compare to see what's different and figure out what needs to be merged. If on windows winmerge is a decent tool for this kind of task.

natefollmer’s picture

natefollmer commented

Winmerge looks like the ticket. I thought about comparing the files, but I figured it would get messy and I'd run the risk of overriding the changes I've made. It looks like you can just add things that are missing and tell Winmerge not to override any existing 'matches'.

Yeah, we were going to make the forums 'read only' until the new site went live. I don't mind people reading, just don't want any new posts made.

Thanks for your help!