Thoughts on migrating from confluence anyone?

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#1

I’ve an old confluence wiki that I wish to migrate to xwiki, and I was thinking of doing it this way:

  1. create the new xwiki and set it up just the way I like
  2. create a subwiki called test with minimal setup
  3. import the confluence xml file into test using the confluence xml import plugin
  4. migrate the pages over to the parent space - basically to give myself the chance to vet the pages one by one and clean up any errors in the pages caused by the export/import process.

My thinking behind this is that I would prefer to import into a seperate subwiki that I could then delete after I’m done so I’m not left with any cruft behind from the import.

So my questions are

  1. has anyone done a large migration?
  2. does my approach sound reasonable, or do you have a better recommendation?
  3. is there a way to move pages between a subwiki and a parent wiki should I chose to go this route? Or do I just export/import as a XAR file between the wikis?

Thanks for any advice you may have on this matter.

#2

Yes, the copy / rename / move page UI allows you to select a different wiki as the destination.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks. That definitely does the trick.

#4

Hi @camtarn thanks walker for sharing your approach. Looks like a good approach for me to follow as well.

Apart from moving, was it easy for you to move from confluence. Can I check with you whether you moved cloud or server version?

Also we need only XML import plugin on x wiki side ? Anything else !

Appreciate your assistance here

#5

Hi @jkbaseer,

Not good news, I’m afraid.

In the end, I decided I didn’t like the import because:

a/ the entire wiki space from confluence was pulled in flat as a flat hierarchy and all structure was lost

b/ the wiki pages converted from confluence required a lot of cleanup. A LOT. That’s not xwiki’s fault, but rather a fault of confluence and the amount of cruft that had built up in the pages over time.

In the end, what I did was copy and paste the wiki pages from confluence to xwiki and that seemed to work better. At least I didn’t have to spend so much time cleaning up the old cruft this way.

Just the same, you can certainly give the export/import a try for yourself to see if you get better results than I did with your wiki.

Good luck!

#6

Not exactly, it’s based on the old parent/child hierarchy (since this was done a long time ago and that’s exactly how it works in Confluence too) which can be migrated to new page hierarchy using https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Nested%20Pages%20Migrator%20Application.

#7

I stand corrected.

#8

Hello @tmortagne,

I just tried to apply this extension after importing a set of Confluence pages using the Confluence filter.
The “plan” showed the correct hierarchy and this hierarchy was also created, but all child pages in the new hierarchy were empty.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you for any insight.

1 Like
#9

Feel like yet another format change in Confluence.

If you can reproduce that with a small package would be great to attach it in a new issue on https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/CONFLUENCE so that I can try to reproduce and fix it.

#10

Thank you for your response. I created https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/CONFLUENCE-45 and attached a small package to reproduce.

#11

@WaltraudE it’s not very clear for me if pages are empty only after using the nested page migrator or before too ?

#12

@tmortagne: the pages have content after import (it is only one line on each page). The content is no longer there after migration. I attach a before and after screenshot.
screenshots-before-after

#13

Hmm OK so that would mean it’s actually a migrator bug. Will test that and move the jira issue if needed.

#14

Yes, sorry if I was not clear about that! I attached a screenshot for clarification on my previous post.

#15

@WaltraudE I would also need the version of XWiki you used.

#16

Its xwiki-platform-distribution-flavor-jetty-hsqldb-10.11.2

#17

OK thanks.

#18

So it’s actually a regression in XWiki (introduced in 10.10) which break the Nested Pages Migrator. Fixing it, it will be part of the next release.

See https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-16112 for more details.

#19

Thank you very much @tmortagne!