Notes

Migrating Facebook plugin comments to WordPress

node script i used to pull comments out of scraped Facebook comments plugin data and map them to wp_comments columns for importing into WordPress

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Programming
2 minutes
WordPress Facebook NodeJS MySQL
  • I already have extracted all the facebook plugin data and have them in a JavaScript file.
  • The site had about 4000 news pages where the Facebook comments plugin was used. Not all of them had comments
  • The scraped file lists all pages regardless of whether it had comments or not. I only need the 70 or so entries where we have comments, i.e. the comments property is there.

Extracting the comments and getting them in WordPress ready format

Following is the JavaScript code used to extract only the comments and get them in the right format to be exported in WordPress database, i.e. change their properties to have the column names in the wp_comments table.

FYI: You can import JSON data in a MySQL table. That’s what we’re gonna do.

You’ll need node to run this code and it’ll create a file called comments.json with the results

 1const data = require('./data')
 2const fs = require('fs')
 3const EventEmitter = require('events').EventEmitter
 4const fileEvents = new EventEmitter()
 5
 6// console.info('All data', data)
 7
 8let mappedComments = []
 9
10data.map(object => {
11  // only get objects where there are comments
12  if (object['og_object'].hasOwnProperty('comments')) {
13    let comments = object['og_object']['comments']['data'] // array of objects
14
15    comments.map(item => {
16      let commentEntry = {
17        comment_author_email: 'info@mydomain.com', // required
18        comment_author: item.from.name, // reuired
19        comment_author_url: 'https://facebook.com/' + item.from.id, // create the URL so that it's the Facebook user's profile link
20        comment_content: item.message, 
21        comment_date: item.created_time,
22        comment_date_gmt: item.created_time,
23        comment_approved: 1, // default is 1
24        comment_post_id: object.og_object.id // this you need to figure out, using the comment object's ID as placeholder for now
25      }
26      // console.info(commentEntry)
27      mappedComments.push(commentEntry)
28    })
29  }
30})
31// console.info('Comments', mappedComments)
32
33// Write the results (in JSON format) to a file
34fs.writeFile('comments.json', JSON.stringify(mappedComments), err => {
35  if (err) throw err
36  console.info('File is created successsfully')
37})

Figuring out the Post IDs

The comments that you extract need to be associated with a post ID in order

If the ID was previously in the URL, you can use regex to get it from that.

I had to figure out what the post ID (comment_post_id) was by looking up the post title in the WordPress database

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