Upgrade and Amalgamate - Suggestions would be appreciated

[Andrew Prior]

I have inherited two CMS Made Simple websites.
One is San Juan: call this Site A.
The other is Bonde: call this Site B.
They have different domain names and are on different web servers

The instructions, and I have no choice here, are to amalgamate the two sites under the one domain name.
Site B is to become a subsite or branch site of the other site, site A. it will appear to be part of site A and lose its original separate identity.
The owner wants to be able to manage the site from the one back end.

1. I can see the first thing is to update them both to the latest version.  I can manage this OK.
2. Any Site B page templates and style sheets which are not in the default install are few enough to be recreated by hand in Site A.
3. But both sites have a lot of pages; I'm talking hundreds. Site B also has a huge amount of content in the news module. It does not seem feasible to me to simply transfer stuff over via cut'n'paste a page, or post, at a time.
4. Luckily Site A is very basic. It does not use Calguy's Feedback Module, which is in use on site B and has a fair bit of data. I can wipe the news module content in Site A (tiny content). There are no front end users to complicate matters.

Question:
How would you go about importing Site B into Site A?  Is such a thing do able? I'd be interested in any suggestions, pointers, experience etc?

feeling a little overwhelmed,
Andrew

[kendo451]

Andrew, I would suggest that you get both sites up to the same version for the CMS and also all the modules.

If you are not using lots of custom fields, this will be easy.  If either site is using custom fields, it will make it much more difficult.

If you are comfortable working with phpMyAdmin then you might want to give this a try.  Otherwise, you could probably hire somebody on this forum to do it for you for not much money.  Maybe two hours of work.

*********************

In the News module, make sure both sites have the same custom fields, categories, etc.

Even though the category names will be the same, in the database each category has an id that is used in the news article table to identify it.  The id's will probably be different on the two sites.

Go into PHPMyAdmin and manage the database for the old site.  The database tables that interest you are:

cms_module_module_news
cms_module_news_categories
cms_modules_news_categories_seq
cms_module_news_fielddefs
cms_module_news_fieldvals

Export only this tables from the old site to a sql file using the Export tab.
cms_module_module_news

Then you can use a text editor to edit the SQL file.

Find the number value for each category in the new site and for each article in the old site that has that category, you need to change the record to reflect the correct number in the new site.

This is the table that matters you can ignore the others:
cms_module_module_news

This is also true of the fields but it is much more complicated.

After you have converted the category values in cms_module_module_news to the values of the new site, then go to the new site, go into PHP My Admin there, and import the records from the file of the old site.  It will automatically put them in the right table.

Definitely back up everything before you try this.

You can use the same general idea with custom fields, but you might want to hire an expert to do it if you have a lot of custom fields.

Ken

[jmcgin51]

I think I would actually do the reverse of what you're thinking of.  import site A into site B, and then change the domain of B so that it is now the primary site.  This would seem to be easier, since it sounds like there is much less data to import from A to B than B to A.

[Andrew Prior]

Guys, thank you. I reckon the reverse import and renaming of the site is a very smart idea... should have thought of that, jmcgin51! 

Ken, I get what you are saying about process... I would have done this in Microsoft SQL, but don't have any background in MySQL so wasn't sure if it will work.  The process seems to be roughly what I hoped it might be, so I will play around.  I have a local testbed up and running, so the fun can begin.

Re your comment: "Definitely back up everything before you try this."  All I can say is, "Only once!??" I'll be swimming in backups, man!