How to migrate file metadata

Kirby 2 only had a single upload section for files in the sidebar and it wasn’t possible to assign different types of metadata fields to different types of files. Kirby 3 changes this completely by replacing this fixed single upload section with files sections. Each page blueprint can define as many files sections as the data structure requires. And each of these sections can use different file blueprints that define the Panel setup for files and the fields available for these files.

This new way of dealing with files gives you much more flexibility but it also means that you have to adapt some things when migrating a Kirby 2 site, because you can no longer define the meta data fields in the page blueprint.

These are the basic steps to migrate your metadata fields to Kirby 3:

1. Remove the old file settings from your page blueprints.
2. Create new file blueprints for each set of files that shares the same fields and other setup options (accepted mime types, dimensions etc.)
3. Fetch/filter the files you want to assign each template to (you might want to filter files according to file type or other criteria).
4. Loop through the files and assign the new template

It’s probably best to go through an example.

Remove the old file settings

Let’s assume that in your Kirby 2 project, the children of the projects page use the project.yml blueprint. In that file, you have the following file settings:

files:
  fields:
    author:
      label: Author
      type: text
    caption:
      label: Caption
      type: text
    description:
      label: Description
      type: textarea

In your new /site/blueprints/project.yml blueprint, remove these lines.

Set up a files section

We now recreate the blueprint with a files section for our files and assign a file template:

title: Project

icon: 🖼

columns:
  main:
    width: 2/3
    fields:
      # some fields here

  sidebar:
    width: 1/3
    sections:
      gallery:
        type: files
        template: project

Now whenever we upload a new file to this new files section, if will be created with the project template.

Create the file blueprint

But stop. We haven't created a blueprints/files/project.yml blueprint yet. Let's do this now.

title: project

accept: image/jpeg, image/png

fields:
  fields:
    author:
      label: Author
      type: text
    caption:
      label: Caption
      type: text
    description:
      label: Description
      type: textarea

We copy our fields from the old blueprint into the new files blueprint. And since we only want user to upload images to this files section, we add an accept option.

Almost there.

Update file metadata

With these blueprints in place, all new files will pick up the file blueprint and show up in the files section. But our old images won't just yet, because their blueprint files are missing the template information. Let's change that.

Create a new update-metadata.php file in your site root.

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/kirby/bootstrap.php';

$kirby = new Kirby;

// authenticate as almighty
$kirby->impersonate('kirby');

foreach (page('projects')->children()->images() as $image) {

  try {
      $image->update([
        'template' => 'project'
      ]);
      echo 'The meta info has been updated';
  } catch (Exception $e) {
      echo $e->getMessage();
  }

}

Then run this script with http://yourdomain.com/update-metadata.php. Delete the script when done.