When an existing community is upgraded, if it did not previously use the Social theme (the default theme for Telligent Community), the upgrade note sent to administrators of the site after a successful upgrade will include a link to enable migrating to the Social theme. The migration enables a site administrator to run the automated migration process and preview the results before publishing the change to use the Social theme for the community.
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What is the Social Theme Migration Process?
The link to get additional details about migrating to the Social theme is provided in the upgrade note sent as a private message to site administrators after a successful upgrade if the Social theme is not currently the selected theme for the site. When clicking the link,
- You'll be presented with an overview of the process and a button to start the migration process.
- Clicking the button will start a background job that will work through the migration.
- When the migration is complete (successful or unsuccessful), a new private message will be sent to the site administrators that includes a link to preview the migration.
- If the migration failed, the error will be shown along with page/context of the issue. Depending on the issue, you may be able to edit the currently published version of the page and re-run the migration to ensure the migration completes before reviewing the Social theme for publishing.
- Clicking the link to start the preview will provide additional instructions and a button to preview the results of the migration.
- Clicking the preview button stages the selection of the Social theme and allows you (and only you) to see the site using the migrated Social theme.
- While previewing, you are free to edit pages, change theme settings, and perform any other edits that you feel are necessary based on the result of the automated migration.
- Once you have completed your review, you can approve and publish the changes via the preview panel that will show on every page as you preview the site.
Re-running the Migration
If the migration fails and you correct the issue noted in the failure notification or you make significant changes to the currently-published theme and want to re-migrate to the Social theme, you can do so at any time. To re-run the migration,
- Go to the original upgrade note and click the Social theme migration link.
- Follow the same process as when you originally ran the migration.
The migration will run again, remigrating every page to the Social theme.
What Exactly Does the Migration Migrate?
The automated migration attempts to review the changes applied to the currently published theme and apply those same changes to the factory default implementation of the Social theme by reviewing every default page, header, and footer as well as every page, header, and footer for every blog, group, site, and user-customizable page. The migration includes many rules and automations to attempt to migrate the source theme while preserving the design and organization that makes the Social theme the Social theme. Some of the more notable rules include:
- Only changes are migrated. Changes are detected against the parent implementation of each page, header, footer. For example, if the factory default of the existing theme includes the activity stream widget and the default page also includes the activity stream widget, this is not a change, and the widget will not be migrated to the default version of the Social theme page. A change is detected only if (1) the widget doesn't exist on the parent implementation of the page, (2) the widget exists on the parent but not on the current page, or (3) the configuration of the widget is changed compared to the parent implementation.
- Custom pages are migrated as-is. Because there is not much context associated to custom content pages, they are migrated mostly as-is. There is generally not a parent page to review to detect changes, so custom pages are generally migrated as they were laid out in their source theme.
- Custom navigation is migrated. Customized navigation in the site banner, group banner, and user banner widgets is automatically migrated.
- The site logo is migrated from the Fiji theme. If the logo was customized in the Fiji theme, it is automatically extracted and applied to the site banner widget in the Social theme.
- Widgets are reorganized to apply to the design of the Social theme. Specifically, primarily actions on content are presented in sidebars in the Social theme. To enforce this, only white-listed widgets are allowed in the sidebar. Widgets migrated from the source theme to the Social theme that were previously defined in the sidebar may be moved to the content column if they are not in the whitelist of allowed widgets.
- Links widgets are collapsed. Changes to configuration of links widgets (for example, "Blog - Links") are separated into two categories in the Social theme: primary/expanded links and secondary/collapsed links. Migrated link widgets and link widget configuration is adjusted to ensure that there are a maximum of two links widgets of any specific link widget type and that the expanded, whitelisted, primary options are shown above the secondary, collapsed options.
- Responsive options are estimated. The Social theme implements support for responsive design. When migrating widgets to the Social theme, responsive options are estimated to attempt to provide a good starting point for responsive behavior.
It is worth noting that the migration process attempts to tackle the bulk of the heavy-lifting work required in a migration but is making best-guesses based on rules defined by the design of the Social theme. The result is intended to be a starting point for review and refinement, not necessarily a ready-to-publish migration. Also, the migration attempts to migrate changes into the Social theme's design structure—layouts will not be preserved as the Social theme uses a different layout structure from other themes.