Migrating/Copying Template Data to Another Template

[louisstephens]

So this is more or less just a question regarding best practices, and how to actually achieve this. I have an internal tool I built awhile ago that has just gotten very "trashed". The naming conventions are all out of whack due to trying to get something completed, and pages are just everywhere. The fields got really out of hand as well, but I believe I have found a much cleaner field structure with the Repeater Matrix and a few other ProFields.  I decided recently to rewrite the template structure and the fields from scratch to keep everything nice and neat, but then it hit me that I would need to move all the previous data over and populate the new fields etc.

The current tree looks something like:

Group Title 
	- Section A (template "section")
		- Category One (template "category")
		- Category Two (template "category")
	- Section B (template "section")
		- Category One (template "category")
		- Category Two (template "category")		
Etc etc...

The structure is pretty good, and I am thinking of keeping it as it serves my purpose. However, I now have about 140 Sections with child pages that I would hopefully like to move to different templates, as well as changing the child templates/mapping data to the new fields. The only fields I need to worry about are a few textareas, text fields, options field,  as well as 1 image filed.

I guess my real question is, what is the best way to go about this "migration" via the api while keeping the parent/child structure. It would be ok to leave it as is and chip away at it if I were the only one using it, but unfortunately that is not the case. 

I guess one approach would be to copy over the entire structure and make the move to the new templates/fields. Once we have verified all the data/templates are correct, we could remove the old structure and possibly rename the new to mirror the old. However, this might just be too complicated.

[Zeka]

I think you will find useful Admin Actions Module 

http://modules.processwire.com/modules/process-admin-actions/

It has a branch of predefined actions, but you can create own.

[louisstephens]

Thanks for the suggestion! Ill have to dive further into the module as I have only used it in a very limited fashion.