Symphony.

I had a project made in symphony 2.0.6 that kept being attacked with malicious badstufs so I decided to install symphony 2.3 and manually transfer my utilities and data sources. Looks nice. Got rid of those nasty old extensions.

I have a mysql backup of my old database and I was wondering if it is possible to get my Sections and Content back? Is it possible to merge data from the old database to the newly created database? I'm okay by doing it manually but I'm just wondering about all this mysql stuff.

It might be possible to update your Symphony 2.0.6 site to Symphony 2.3 while migrating the old data as well as the templates and data sources. It depends on the extension dependencies and the fields you have used to store data and relationships. For example, here is a walk through of how I updated the Piano Sonata ensemble from Symphony 2.0.6 to Symphony 2.3.

The process was not without its challenges, but I was able to keep the basic data intact. I did have to manually restore relationships between fields because of dependencies on deprecated extensions, but because there weren't that many entries to deal with, that was the easy part.

Or, if you'd rather use what you already have working, you're probably going to be much better off with the something like the XML Importer extension, unless you are experienced with running MySQL data migrations.

Okay, well I mutilated the Piano Sonata ensemble so bad by now that it's nowhere near recognizable. I used it to learn Symphony, but by now its a whole different website.

So if it was challenge for you, I'm sure I won't get very far. I'm actually surprised how easy it was to get my code working in 2.3, so I'm keen to stick to the chosen path. Upgrading was never even my intention, but after my site got infected the Mediathek extension stopped working. I'm going to switch to the sub section manager extension, so I think theres the first of many aspects of migrating that won't go well.

I think I'm going to restore my sections manually, but it would be nice to be able to see the structure of the old sections for memory purposes (or lack thereof). Is it possible to see into the XML from a backup ensemble I have?

Is the backup ensemble actually running on a localhost or server? That would be the only way to grab the XML, unfortunately. If you do have it running, it's just a simple matter of viewing the ?debug data.

Or if it is on a live server, you can set the page types for every page to include admin, xml so only a logged in author can see the output and you can set the content type to XML. If it is a localhost, don't bother with that last step. Then, copy the workspace/master.xsl file to workspace/master-original.xsl. In the master.xsl file, change the stylesheet to output XML instead of HTML and replace the match template for the root element with an instruction that will output the XML data. If you use this stylesheet, it will pretty print the XML for you:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*" />
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" />
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:copy-of select="*" />
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

If you have code snippets you want to preserve, you might want to omit the <xsl:strip-space elements="*" /> instruction.