Migrating From Ning to Drupal

Posted May 7th, 2010 by Bill

Topics: open data | online community | Ning | Drupal | community

As many of you may have heard, Ning recently eliminated its free networks and laid off 40% of its staff. Currently, Ning supports exporting users; for those of you interested in migrating your community members from Ning into Drupal, you have two well developed options at your disposal:

User Import: http://drupal.org/project/user_import
Feeds: http://drupal.org/project/feeds

If Ning ever opened up their APIs to allow content export, then importing the content would be equally straightforward. Both the Feeds module and the Node Import module would get the job done.

Another option for data import is a combination of the Table Wizard and the Migrate module.

If you are launching a Ning site now, setting up a Drupal site to import that content via RSS using the Feeds module wouldn't be a bad idea. Should Ning go out of business, or change their terms again, or if your organization makes the decision to take control of your web presence, your data (and the intellectual capital of your community) won't be in the hands of a content silo.

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Comments

NING Export tools are released - Got time for a tutorial?

Submitted on June 23rd, 2010 by Alex Rollin

Hi there,

Perhaps you heard that the NING export tools were recently released. The tools allow users to choose from the different types of content on the site and then export JSON feed files and save them locally.

I can imagine that it is possible to reformat these docs in a way that would allow the node_import module to use them.

Care to take a look and let me know what you think?

http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/content-archive-tool-coming?commentId=4244211:Comment:204924&xg_source=activity

Yes, possible to get data OUT, how to get it IN

Submitted on July 19th, 2010 by Josef Davies-Coates

As Alex points out above it is now possible, using the Ning Archiver, to get all of the data OUT of a Ning network:
http://help.ning.com/cgi-bin/ning.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3796

However, some step-by-step advice on how best to get the data IN to a fresh drupal install would be of great value.

Custom json parser for feeds module

Submitted on July 31st, 2010 by Bill

I haven't looked at the json code that Ning generates, but the first way I'd try to get this into a Drupal site would be via a custom parser for the Feeds module.

This page has a listing of current parsers for the Feeds module, including a link to an issue for a json parser: http://drupal.org/node/856644