Converters: Enable incremental conversion started from a date

[casiepa]

Not every site is suitable for a 'big bang' or can afford some days of not being online.

bbPress converters should be able to perform a first full import and then an incremental one starting from a specific date/time after the new environment has been validated.

[casiepa]

It seems that adding _bbp_converter_start value to the options table indicating the record is possible, but it might not be easy to calculate that value manually. It's also unclear if that value is about topics, replies, post IDs ...

[netweb]

Discussed this the other day, and my thoughts were that limiting the MySQL query by a user submitted date/time would be more reliable than trying to calculate any _bbp_converter_start offsets.

[johnjamesjacoby]

This is doable.

The converter would need to accept a column/boundary pair to start from, guess the new starting offset.

I can see us either:

• predefining columns that can be used for this
• a simple column/boundary picker UI

The hardest part, thinking out loud, is user accounts and authorship. In a partial import, the likelihood of user ID collisions between source and destination is high, meaning that user IDs would need double checking and juggling to make sure everything is assigned to the correct author.

(The converter does some of this already, but I think it doesn’t do everything it would need in this exact scenario.)

I like the idea. It’s worth pursuing.