WordPress Migration: Tidying up the comments

This is the seventh in a series of articles on my migration to WordPress. In this post, I’ll talk about how I did some cleaning up of the comments after I imported them.

Clean? What’s to clean

After importing the comments, I noticed, or rather, I was reminded, that Phorum does some things that WordPress doesn’t. Specifically tokens.

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. Not all comments have them. Some do. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix. At one point, I thought, what if there are multiple tags in the comment? So I tried an query to detect that situation. First, we count to check that removing removes just one such tag per comment. I feared that some comments might contain nested tags, which were relevant to the comment.

SELECT comment_ID, 
       user_id,
       char_length(replace(comment_content, '&lt;HTML&gt;', '')) - char_length(comment_content) <> -12
  FROM wp_comments
 WHERE comment_content LIKE '&lt;HTML&gt;%';

If the third column is all zeroes, we’re good to go. And we were. Now let’s check the closing tag:

SELECT comment_ID, 
       user_id,
       char_length(replace(comment_content, '&lt;/HTML&gt;', '')) - char_length(comment_content) <> -13
  FROM wp_comments
 WHERE comment_content LIKE '&lt;HTML&gt;%';

And we’re still good to go. On with the query!

UPDATE wp_comments
   SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, '&lt;/HTML&gt;', '')
 WHERE comment_content 
  LIKE '&lt;HTML&gt;%';Query;

UPDATE wp_comments
   SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, '&lt;HTML&gt;', '')
 WHERE comment_content 
  LIKE '&lt;HTML&gt;%';Query

Notice that I first removed the tag, then the tag. This was because I used the same WHERE clause on both updates.

OK. What’s next?

There may be more to come in this series. I know I want to do a URL test to ensure all the old URLs still work. Perhaps I’ll do that next. Unless something else comes to mind first.