WordPress Migration: Updating the comment signatures

This is the sevent in a series of articles on my migration to WordPress. In this post, I’ll talk about how I updated some of the comments to deal with some tokens left over from the previous system.

Tokens? What tokens?

When I copied over the comments from my old system, I took the raw text. In hindsight now, as I type this, I think I could have injected the token values into the comments instead of just taking the raw text. Now, I have this in a comment:

Thanks for this summary!
One thing I have to remind myself evey time I go to create further client certificates on my FreeBSD server is to start a bash shell before running those commnads as my default shell is out of the box csh (I think) – it may be that others hit this (simple) block…
Simply start the shell (if installed from ports) by typing ‘bash’ before proceeding.

[%sig%]

See that [%sig%]? That’s the Phorum token for the user’s signature. I want to get rid of that and replace it with something less obtrusive.

In my case, I want to change my signature to ‘The Man Behind The Curtain‘.

Very carefully!

I have to do this very carefully. I will be updating a MySQL database which has no transactions. This is one basic reason why I wish WordPress used PostgreSQL, which, by default, has transactions.

Here is the SQL I came up with to verify what I wanted to do:

SELECT comment_ID,
       user_id,
       replace(comment_content, '[%sig%]', '-- \nThe Man Behind The Curtain')
  FROM wp_comments
 WHERE comment_content LIKE '%\[\%sig\%\]%'
   AND user_id = 1154;

Checking the output, I saw the expected results. So now I moved onto the UPDATE command:

UPDATE wp_comments\
   SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, '[%sig%]', '-- \nThe Man Behind The Curtain')
 WHERE comment_content LIKE '%\[\%sig\%\]%'
   AND user_id = 1154;

That’s it. That’s all my comments updated. As you can see, I had user id 1154.

Now we need to update all the other users… Sadly, they will just lose their signatures.

UPDATE wp_comments\
   SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, '[%sig%]', '')
 WHERE comment_content LIKE '%\[\%sig\%\]%';

The HTML tags

In previous posts, I thought I had some <HTML> tags to deal with. But as I search now, I can’t find any, neither in the comments nor in the posts.

I guess my work here is done. :)

Website Pin Facebook Twitter Myspace Friendfeed Technorati del.icio.us Digg Google StumbleUpon Premium Responsive

Leave a Comment

Scroll to Top