Hello, all....

I have a six-year old pMachine website (I was the first paying customer for pMachine, BTW), and am finally making the transition to EE.  I created a new domain on the same server, imported all my pMachine data, and built the new site.  While I was doing that, the old site continued to be updated.  So now I want to wipe all the data from my EE installation (leaving the templates, preferences, etc. intact) and re-import my pMachine data before making my new site live.  But I don’t see a way to do this.  Help!

Wow- the first paying customer!  I thought I’d been around a while.  Let’s see- this may take some experimenting.  IT might be easiest to use one of the third part importers to JUST pull in the new data- there’s one that will import a CSV file and another that will pull rss data.  Or- we could make a copy of the current pm install- delete all of the ‘old’ data that’s already in EE and then import the rest?  Or- delete all current EE entries and do a full re-import from the pm machine.

The key will be on the pm end of things- how easy is it to get just the new bits- either in CSV format, rss, or in a temporary install that exists only for importing.  I don’t know- which option sounds easiest given your data?

(And I may shift this over to ‘How to’ if we get into the nitty gritty details.)

Thanks for the quick reply - I think the cleanest thing to do would be to set up another EE installation, bring over my prefs and templates from the previous one, then do a clean re-import of all the pMachine data (on the same server).  I’ll let you know how it goes!

How hard is it to delete all EE posts and members, and do a re-import?  If that is easy, I might do that.

To delete posts is easy, simply delete the weblog they’re in.

To delete members isn’t too bad - you can just “check all” and click “delete” in Admin -> Members and Groups -> View Members. If you don’t have a huge number of users this shouldn’t be too difficult.

Any easier way to mass-delete members?  Can I just nuke the exp_members table?  (Saving my row, of course)

You’d need to hit exp_members, exp_member_homepage and exp_member_data.  And that’s assuming you nuke any comments and weblog entries that might be attached.  You’d want to recount stats- but you’ll need to do that after the import, so no biggie there.  I won’t swear on my life- there are a few other things attached to member data, such as pms- but if those aren’t a concern, I do believe that would do it.  I’d be sure to have good backups before trying to do it manually, though.

Any way to get a longer member listing to show up in the EE control panel?  I really wanna do a select all, unselect my name and hit delete.

Haven’t tested this- but pop open system/cp/cp.members.php and around line 35:

Try upping that, see what it gets us.

How about using the Data Pruning utility in the Admin area to remove members safely?

Lisa: This turned out to be the best solution.  Thanks-

Glad that did the trick.  We good to close this one out?

Marking as resolved. If anything else comes up, related or not, kindly start a new thread, thanks.