Autarchy of the Private Cave

Just a minute ago, I was shocked after logging in to mail.bigmir.net: instead of the bigmir’s own, HTML-only email interface, I got redirected at the gmail’s “Terms and conditions”, after accepting which I found my emails in the classic gmail mailbox.

First thing to think about: at least they did transfer all my emails to the new account.

Second: hey, they had given up their own email interface! Are they leaving the web-portal market of Ukraine? Was the part of their team (which later formed MI6) too important to handle their exodus with no consequences? Is that just a desire to give customers “better” interface and not invest anything into development?

I hope this won’t be a trend, for every service to have Google behind their servers. Or even just behind the name, to avoid extra complexity of having a server.

Finally, I think I’ll get used. But it was only yesterday, that I read the Google anti-utopia, where Big Brother’s name is (evidently) Google, and it’s webcams and microphones and search history define each person’s future AND guilt. Scary…

And I wonder which will be the next service of bigmir.net, “outsourced” like their email.

Post last updated: April 18, 2010.

Now there is a Drupal 6.x module available. It is in no way related to the migrate script(s) below.

The newest script version migrates from PHP-Nuke 6.5 to Drupal 5.x.
Download the latest version of the migration script.

In 2002 I set up a PHPNuke-6.0 – based portal. Eventually it died due to the lack of time investments and support from collaborators. Now, when time came to revive the project, I made a search and decided to use Drupal as a base CMS for the portal.
In order to migrate userbase from an old portal to the new Drupal-powered one, and following the topic at drupal.org, I found a script and its modification.
I used it to migrate only users, and made some cosmetic changes:

• added options for custom phpnuke table prefixes
• default user name is now = uname (login), not ‘temp_name’, as before
• I replaced hard-coded links to ‘migrate.php’ with links to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], so that if you rename the script you don’t have any problems with that
• now forum topics should not be promoted to the main page (changed 1 to 0 as hinted by Alexis)

Finally, I would like to thank both Karthik Kumar for the original script and Alexis Bellido for the 6.0_to_4.7 modification.
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