There I was, searching a way to migrate content from Nucleus (version 3.3x) to Drupal 6.
Some ‘migrate’, ‘import’ or ‘xxx2drupal’ modules for Drupal could be found, but none of them were suitable for Nucleus source data. It also seemed like some HTML fiddling was required to really make the content ready for publication on Drupal.

I decided to learn some Ruby and a bit of Drupal’s database scheme by processing exported Nucleus tables and transforming them into INSERT statements for Drupal’s tables. Countless hours were wasted learning how to preserve articles, comments, authors, categories and more…

The little Ruby script eventually did the trick. Now that it’s practically too late to be of any use (it’s been almost two years!), I’m nonetheless enticed to release nucleus2drupal.rb v0.1 onto the pipes.

If you want to try, here’s how it goes:

• Unpack nucleus2drupal.
• Export your Nucleus tables (category, comment, item, member) using phpMyAdmin into the queries-source directory (nucleus_category.sql, etc).
• Modify the query templates in the queries-insert/ directory so that they’ll work for your Drupal database.
• Take a look at nucleus2drupal.rb itself and the settings (and warnings) therein.
• Execute ./nucleus2drupal.rb.
• If the resulting SQL files (directory queries-insert/) look okay, then execute them against your (test!) Drupal database.

I’ve tried to clean up most hard-coded specifics, but your mileage may vary. Remember to pay close attention to text encodings along the way if your content is beyond plain ASCII.

Should you eventually fail, let me know how you’re liking that Migrate module instead

However, this input format is very complex and not very flexible.

An existing ‘link component’ patch to flexifilter is much more compact and easier to configure.

In my view, that’s the nice thing about flexifilters: you don’t need to dabble in code if you want to change or configure an input format. Instead all parts are small and self-contained, configurable units.

In this case, a dip in the code was unavoidable because of a known bug. While at it, I also built in support for clean URLs trough the pathauto module. The result is in the issue queue.

For easy installation, you can download the filter here as an installable module: flexifilter_wiki_url.tar.gz. Feedback is welcome…

I’ll be attending FOSDEM this weekend (albeit not the full weekend).

Unlike previous editions I was hardly involved in the speaker interviews — the very capable K.V. handled those this year. I did contribute to the questions in Brion Vibber’s interview though.

The organizers are once again making a nice leap in quality. Case in point: the cloakroom, the sunday bus home, and of course BDA v3.1.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

When the network is up and running, use it to send a message to Broadcom to demand some hardware specs for the b43 driver authors.

• Firefox bookmark keywords / keyword searches
• Alt+F2 mini-shell command widget on Linux
• Launchy on Windows
• A text replacement tool like Texter

I really liked it because it ‘just works’, and has a lot of potential for extensions. In a way, it’s more of a platform that a tool. However, since platforms tend to get ignored if they have few users, I felt Enso could use some freeing up (of both price and source code) to get the ball rolling.

Seeing it just disable itself after the trial period was a real disappointment, also from a usability point of view.

Luckily, the Humanized team has been thinking in the same direction. From now on, Enso is free (the source code is still closed but this could change in the future).

What’s more, Humanized is joining forces with Mozilla. In terms of building a platform and reaching lots of users, this is a major announcement.

I was thinking about comparing Enso with KDE’s extensible krunner, Katapult or (the Quicksilver-like) Gnome Do, but this announcement indicates that Mozilla might be planning something even broader in scope. I’m looking forward to Firefox 4

Go look at the call for devrooms at the spiffy new FOSDEM 2008 website.

Speaker interviews for this edition are planned, but not yet available.

If it is for you though, then please consider buying this Ultimate Edition box on eBay. In an ironic twist, the full sale price goes to ubuntu-be.org.

Trying out the examples in the book, I was a bit disappointed about the templating system in Rails (called ERB). This is just the same ugly HTML/code/indentation/tag soup mess as one would get with PHP. I’d expected someone would have solved this issue by now, preferably in an elegant, Rails-consistent way.

And lo and behold, via the Riding Rails webblog I notice the existence of Haml, “Markup haiku”. Elegant, readable, indentation-aware — and simple and efficient. Great.

Except for on thing: all code expressions only affect one line, which means that loops and conditionals with markup in them just don’t compile. Which you wouldn’t need anyway if everything is nicely componentized and such, but it still would be handy sometimes. Maybe in a next version?