Migrating my old mysql blog database to a new blog software (PluggedOut)

Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 2 min read • 214 words We updated my server from SuSE 9.3 to 10.1. php5 is the default on 10.1 and my blog software broke. As my blog software is not anymore maintained, I had to switch to another and I selected PluggedOut  . The mysql database structures were quite different and this is what I did to do the conversion:First I dumped the old database into textfiles:mysqldump -u root -p --tab=/home/jeltsch/temp --fields-terminated-by=| --lines-terminated-by=# journalThen I opened the textfiles in a spreadsheet application and added the necessary columns and fixed the formats. Then I exported into a csv file and imported back into the new database:mysql -u root -p pluggedoutmysql> DELETE FROM blog2_entries;mysql> OPTIMIZE TABLE blog2_entries;mysql> WARNINGS;mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE '/home/jeltsch/export.csv' INTO TABLE blog2_entries FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',';The WARNINGS command shows you when there are problems. Mostly they were related to the field delimiter (comma). I had to escape all commas, that were not field delimiters (,). I also needed to fix the date format (swap month and day). Since the categories were maintained in a separate table, I recreated a csv file by hand and set all entries to belong to the category “computer”. This .csv file was pretty simple:1,1,22,2,23,3,24,4,2 etc.mysql> DELETE FROM blog2_entry_categories;mysql> OPTIMIZE TABLE blog2_entry_categories;mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE '/home/jeltsch/cat.csv' INTO TABLE blog2_entry_categories FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',';