Successful use of FullJournalTransfer Plugin in 3.3?

Hello, we were just wondering if anyone had successfully used the FullJournalTransfer plugin GitHub - lepidus/fullJournalTransfer: OJS plugin for importing/exporting a journal with all its private information (e.g. submitted articles, reviews, editorial decisions, etc.) to transfer a journal from one 3.3 OJS installation onto another 3.3 OJS installation? If you have, do you have any tips and tricks for making the process smoother, warnings for things to look out for, or notes about things you wish the plugin had done/not done?
We are looking into using it for a journal that wishes to begin publishing under our publishing program, but we would welcome any insight from anyone who has already used it. Thank you!

Hi @KestrelSWard

I suggest you contact lapidus fellows directly with a gitHub issue… or mention @abadan that can give you more reliable information.

Anyway, here my two cents:

  • Take in consideration this is a command-line plugin (probably this is a general problem with PKP and we should make more clear in the plugin documentation and descriptions when it happens). So, you need to run it in your command line to “export” and then, run again in the command line to “import”.
  • It need to be installed in the plugins/importexport folder (usually people install in generic) and I don’t know if it’s only me but sometimes the plugin is perfectly installed but not shown in the plugins list.
  • The version I ran is very verbose, yelling when it has any schema complains (and this don’t give much confidences, as you feel some data will be missing).
  • As explained in the documentation, it will only work if your source and destination installations the same version or very close.

In short, I managed to export and import articles from one ojs to another with this plugin but I feel it’s not yet ready for newcomers.

Anyway, it’s a great contribution for the community, as we still lack of a good method to move journals from one site to another.

Cheers,
m.