Migrating from legacy Symbiostock

What happens to our existing sites? I have over 5000 images uploaded. Are we going to have to re-upload everything? What about all the hours and SEO work we’ve put into getting our sites up and running?
This is all very unclear so far.

Steve

Hi Steve – first of all, you are not under pressure to upgrade your system. You can keep using your current site until you feel ready to upgrade to the new Symbiostock.

I will be posting up a full feature list and will also discuss the importer, but will try to answer you as best as possible here.

I have developed and tested a fully automated importer that will import all your previous Symbiostock images, their keywords, tags, titles and descriptions. It will also import relevant other data, such as releases, rating, etc.

However, due to the limitations of the old system (which was in essence a standalone theme), aspects such a licensing and categories will not be imported. Once you import all your images, you will have to then apply licensing to your media along with categories.

That being said, one of the cool features of the new Symbiostock is mass licensing based on media type. This means that you no longer have to individually change and edit product licensing pricing if you don’t want to. You can just enter a number, click a button, and all your products that have that license enabled will have their price updated. Additionally, you can apply default licenses to media based on their type.

So, here is how the import process would work. You would install Symbiostock on your new site along with the Symbiostock Importer/Exporter (both are free). You will then install the same Importer/Exporter on the Symbiostock legacy site. You run the import dialogue – this will not affect your old site. Once all the data is transferred to the new one, you will uninstall the importer/exporter.

Then, you go to our Licensing area where you will decide which license applies to what, with what pricing, and enable updates site-wide. This will apply that license to images or vectors (depending on your filetype) at the price you set. Symbiostock will come bundled with default licensing modeled after most corporate agencies, but you can change that in any way you want. The new Symbiostock has an unlimited number of licenses – you can call them what you want, write your own license, or use the default ones that come with it.

Once the licenses are applied and your images are fully imported, you can then mass categorize them to match your previous settings. At this point, your new site is ready to go. However, as you have mentioned, you may have done a lot of marketing work on your previous site and want to preserve this.

During the beta session I will work with contributors to figure out the best way of achieving this, but rest assured we’ll figure out a way to automatically forward your old URLs to the new ones retaining full link juice. Also, the new Symbiostock, being an isolated plugin, will allow you to go mad with SEO on your new site. You can install Yoast SEO, or any other flavor you want and manage your pages that way.

All in all, the point is that it will involve some work, but most of the methods are automated and work to alter files on a mass basis so you won’t have to individually edit much.

Hey Steve – in that case, you would just install the new Symbiostock and the Importer/Exporter on the same wordpress install, then follow the same instructions. You will then have both the old and new Symbiostocks on the same server. However, it is likely they will not work together simultaneously and it is recommended you de-activate the old one once you switch to the new one. I will post instructions later on how to clean your server of the old install.

The importer/exporter has been designed to operate in a non-invasive manner so your current setup will not be affected.

I’ll try to answer all the questions I can, and completely understand the eagerness for information. Just note that I will be writing extensive documentation on using Symbiostock and will also be putting out a feature list.

One thing I will cover that all three of you (actually all 4 of you) have mentioned as a concern, and that is installation/migration effort and time.

The first thing to note is that once Symbiostock is released, it will come as both a standalone plugin and a hosted solution. In the hosted solution, you will not have to install anything. Symbiostock will come pre-installed, and you literally have to sign up and start uploading. There is no server maintenance, and you will never see PHP or database or filesystem issues. This will all be maintained by us. Kind of like Gmail.

As for the standalone plugin, at this point you can basically install a fresh copy of WordPress, WooCommerce, and Symbiostock, and start uploading files immediately. Your storefront is then live in about 5 minutes. The importer has been tested and works, but if you should encounter issues, come and post them and I’ll try to help. As the importer does NOT affect your current site, you don’t need to feel worried about anything breaking.

However, as the previous Symbiostock was not coded by me, and it was bundled as a plugin/theme combo meant to run both in the back and front end, it is recommended that if you are able to, you install the new Symbiostock on a fresh WordPress install. As WooCommerce is a complete, full and extensive ecommerce system, it may conflict with the old version if both are live at the same time.

The transition away from the previous version of Symbiostock may involve some work, but I firmly believe that upgrading is worth it. Onto your questions.

Redneck: Once we start the closed beta, I’m sure users will post their live test sites for people to see. You will get a chance to see lots of different flavors of Symbiostock Express (our first theme).

cascoly wrote:

many of us have yoast installed an have done extensive editing to optimize SEO on an image by image basis — does this data disappear in the migration?

We will have to look at it on a case by case basis during beta testing. Nothing needs to be lost, it all depends on what takes more work – porting it over or re-creating it. My guess is porting it over will be less work, so I will do everything I can to make sure you can do this. As everyone will have SEO’d their sites differently, during the beta phase I will try to gather information about this so I can tweak the importer/exporter so it retains your URLs. This is not as much a Symbiostock issue as a general issue – whenever you switch sites/servers/software, you try your best. This forum, for example, was moved from Symbiostock.com, which itself had been moved from the Symbiostock.org of the past. Every time this happened, some data/URLs were lost because not all systems are compatible. Even though this forum is running off the same software as the previous one, it still could not be ported over perfectly.

also, regarding where these versions will live — I have many external links and google indexing that point to my symbio site at http://cascoly-images.com/pix so I don’t see that I can delete that site anytime soon. So where would I put the new system & how will they get along? would I be able to install a new wp in say http://cascoly-images.com/pix2 and have both sites running??

With .htaccess you can do just about anything, and yes, you can have multiple copies of wordpress running off the same server, even off the same database. Again, this complicates your setup, but is definitely do-able. Again, during the beta phase we will work through all this as best as possible. I don’t see big issues creeping up.