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Removing SEBLOD Formatting Tags From Your Joomla Database

SEBLOD CCK LogoUnwary installers of the powerful SEBLOD Content Construction Kit (CCK) from Octopoos sometimes find out that its learning curve is more than they bargained for, or that it is overkill for their site. If they atttempt to uninstall the SEBLOD component, they find out that their Joomla articles have some unwanted artifacts which remain in them: SEBLOD tags which display as funny text in their articles. They look like this: ::cck::24::/cck::

What follows is a method for removing the unwanted tag text using a text editor capable of doing Grep pattern searching. There may be other ways of doing this, but this method worked for me. I also shared it with the SEBLOD folks via their support forum.

Preparation:

You'll need a text editing application capable of doing Grep pattern searching (don't worry, this pattern is not complex). I use the Barebones Software products BBEdit and/or Text Wrangler. You'll also need to have access to your database via a database manager like phpMyAdmin.

Do a MySQL database export using phpMyAdmin and copy it to your local workstation if it didn't already prompt you to do so. it will save you some time if during the export you select Custom and then scroll down and check the include Drop Tables checkbox so that when you import it, it will drop all of the existing tables for you.

Some may want to setup a duplicate testing site on which you can practice. I didn't because I figured that if I messed up, I could just overwrite the database with my clean master backup.

Getting Started:

Navigate to the place to where you downloaded your site's database file.

Duplicate the database file and name it different than the master version. I added "WF" to the filename for "workfile".

Preliminary Test:

With the workfile version open, do the following preliminary checks in order to see what you're up against:

1. Launch your Grep capable text editor and open up your database workfile.

2. Initiate a search by pressing Command + F (Mac), Control + F (PC).

3. Enable the Grep feature by clicking the Use Grep checkbox.

4. Click the Start at Top checkbox if it isn't already checked.

5. Type the following text into the Search For text field*:

::cck::[0-9]+::/cck::

6. Press Find All and wait for the results. If you haven't already done so, enable the Show Line Numbers in your text editor. Then you'll know how many occurrences of the searched for phrase there are in your database file.

Do the work:

7. Repeat the above steps for the the Grep search as directed above, but this time make sure that the Replace With text field is empty, and then press the Replace All button. This will delete those tags found by the search phrase because you replaced them with nothing.

8. Run through the searches listed below one line at a time, making sure you disable the Grep search feature for these searches. Copy and paste each line into the Search For field, click Start at top, leave the Replace With text field empty and click the Replace All button.

::cck::24::/cck:: (Skip this, you did this search already in the Grep search.)
::introtext::
::/introtext::
::fulltext::
::/fulltext::
::description::
::/description::

9. Save your revised database file.

Uninstalling SEBLOD from Joomla:

10. Login to your site's Joomla administrator area and go to Extensions/Extension Manager and click the Manage tab to make it active.

11. As directed in the SEBLOD instructions, click on the Select Type filter and choose Package to filter the list to display only installed packages.

12. Click the checkbox at the left of the SEBLOD package and then click the Uninstall button in the top left corner.

Updating the Database with phpMyAdmin:

13. Login to phpMyAdmin and select your site's database. WHM/cPanel hosting accounts give you access to phpMyAdmin through your cPanel interface.

14. Once in phpMyAdmin, click the Import tab and and then under File to Import where it says Browse your computer, click the Choose File button, navigate to your database workfile and select it and click Okay. Click the Go button at the bottom of the Import page to start the import of your database workfile.

15. phpMyAdmin will notify you when the import is complete.

16. You'll need to go through the database tables in phpMyAdmin and delete the various SEBLOD tables. Select your database and check the tables that have the following name structure:

josprefix_cck_core_...

After checking them all, scroll to the bottom bar and click on the pulldown menu that says With Selected and choose Drop.

Confirm the drop by clicking Yes.

That ought to do it! Check your site for errors. If you find something, reload the database with your master version and then re-do the steps making sure not to miss anything.

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NOTES:

*In Step 5 above, note the SEBLOD opening (::cck::) and closing t(::/cck::) tags at the beginning and end of the phrase. the part in the center — [0-9]+ — is the grep search pattern. SEBLOD creates an ID number for each content item. The Grep pattern allows you to search for them all in one step.

It appears that SEBLOD only inserts the SEBLOD tags into the _categories and _content tables, since the search did not reveal any other affected tables.

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