Migrating From Sitefinity 3: Disqus Comments
This post is part of a series exploring my migration from Sitefinity 3 to 4.4. Some of this information may become obsolete as newer versions are released. Always watch the official Sitefinity website for the latest info.
The final step in migrating this site from Sitefinity 3 was to restore the Disqus comments on my blog. As I mentioned sometime ago, I replaced the Sitefinity comments with Disqus and have used it ever since.
Unfortunately, Disqus uses the Url as the identity key for each discussion. As I've mentioned throughout this series of migration posts, I am using the new Sitefinity blog Url format, which means all my comments were lost. Disqus saw the new Urls and assumed these were new discussions.
Disqus Tools
Fortunately, Disqus has you covered with several helpful migration tools of their own for situations just like this.
There is a Domain Migration Wizard, helpful if you are moving to a different domain. You can also upload a CSV file that manually maps old Urls to the new ones.
The easiest solution by far however has to be the Redirect Crawler. This tool will navigate through the original Disqus Urls and if there is a 301 redirect, update the identity Urls for the discussion so that they transfer to the new Url.
Thanks to the IIS Url Rewrite Module, this is already done, and I simply needed to run the tool and wait for it to crawl my site. Now all my old Disqus discussions have been redirected, and the existing comments are now visible on all my old posts.
Wrapping Up
And with that, my migration is complete! I transferred all my old pages and posts into a brand new theme. I migrated some content to my business site Page Init Solutions. I took advantage of the slick new Blog Url format, using a custom Blogs Provider to take full control of the Url format. I took care of redirecting all the old Urls, and imported all my old Disqus comments.
I hope that anyone else going through this process finds this series helpful, and if you have any questions, you can always consult the Sitefinity Migration Discussion Forum, or feel free to send me your questions as well!
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SelAromDotNet
Josh loves all things Microsoft and Windows, and develops solutions for Web, Desktop and Mobile using the .NET Framework, Azure, UWP and everything else in the Microsoft Stack.
His other passion is music, and in his spare time Josh spins and produces electronic music under the name DJ SelArom.
