Import other forums into Askbot

Askbot supports importing of data from StackExchange and Zendesk.

Warning

If your database contains any data prior to importing, please back it up before proceeding.

StackExchange

Add askbot.importers.stackexchange to the list of INSTALLED_APPS list in your settings.py, then run:

python manage.py migrate

Then there will be two ways to import your StackExchange dump:

• via the web at url /import-data/, relative to your forum installation

• using a management command:

  python manage.py load_stackexchange /path/to/your-se-data.zip
  

Zendesk

Add askbot.importers.zendesk to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in the settings.py, run python manage.py migrate.

Prepare your zendesk files: put all your .xml files into one directory and tar-zip it:

mkdir somedir
mv *.xml somedir #select the zendesk xml files and move them to the directory
tar cvfz zendesk.tgz somedir #name of the tgz file is not important

Then run the import script:

python manage.py import_zendesk zendesk.tgz #file name is the parameter

Note

It is possible that import script will make some mistakes in determining which post in the group is the question, due to some specifics of zendesk data format. If so, please enable feature “Forum data rules”->”allow switching question with answer” in live settings and use it in an admin or a moderator account.