Manila converted to Drupal
For the last few months I have toyed with the idea of adapting my conversion process to convert a Manila site to Drupal. The code I have does it’s thing with standard APIs supported in WordPress – the same APIs are supported in Drupal.
The internal link converter would need to know about Drupal node addresses (WordPress: ‘?page_id=75′, Drupal: ‘/node/75′).
Being too busy with many site conversion however I did not get to mess with it until yesterday – facing a site that would have been heartbreaking to convert in to WordPress. We’ve taken a shine to Drupal around here – and as a content management system it beats WordPress paws-down. Most blogs are better off in WordPress actually, but sites needing content management and offering lots of different content really do better in Drupal.
So I patched up my code and added a couple custom APIs to Drupal and pulled the trigger to convert a client’s Manila site in to a Drupal site.
The result? All the content showed up on the Drupal site with all images served from new Drupal URLs placed as expected and all internal links converted to their new Drupal URLs.
I had to shut off certain aspects of the conversion – so Manila nav bars did not get converted and no Manila members got ported either. I got all the posts, stories, images and Gems. The rest has to be done by hand – which for medium to plus-size sites should not be too burdensome. So thats where I’ll leave it for now – head over to Weblogger.com if you need your Manila site converted to WordPress or Drupal (there must be tens of you!)
Contact Form in WordPress vs Drupal
I recently set up a contact form on a WordPress site – and it reminded me what a rigid process extending WordPress (WP) is.
Contact forms running reCAPTCHA protection seem to fair pretty well at cutting spam, so I found a plugin by a nice chap called Deko Boko – Nice plugin and it seems to work fine, it’s just a shame the poor guy had to build the entire admin interface, posting catching and emailing mechanisms and finally tie in the reCAPTCHA support from scratch.
Looking to do the same thing on a Drupal site I manage the experience and process was quite different. Drupal Modules (think WP Plugins, but smarter) snap together like legos to form workflows that fit your needs. You can do things through the Drupal interface that would require PHP coding in WP.
First I enabled the Contact module, included in the base Drupal install. Then I downloaded a Contact Form Module which did not include the support of the specific reCAPTCHA scheme I desired, but had every other feature I was looking for.
Next I downloaded a Drupal specific reCAPTCHA module, and the base PHP library from the reCAPTCHA folks and deposited those files in their appropriate folders in my Drupal install.
WordPress does provide ways for developers to modify output and have certain actions triggered by WP functions, Drupal takes this much farther by setting up an environment that allows for Drupal Modules to modify the behavior of each other. This can shift the balance of power to the sys admins, advanced users who don’t quite know what they are doing with PHP and away from PHP savvy web developers.
Once I had the reCAPTCHA plugin set up and working – I used it’s interface from my Drupal admin area to select the form generated by the contact form module and shizzam – I put my peanut butter in your chocolate! The guy who wrote the contact form module did not need to add specific reCAPTCHA support to his module, and the reCAPTCHA module guy did not do anything special to allow the modification of the previous plugin to use reCAPTCHA. Neat huh?
Fiji has her forever home!
Our sweet Fiji went to her forever home this weekend. Happy and playful, Fiji is also curious and smart. And did I mention determined. I find her personality irresistible, and so too does her new forever parents. Her description on the Fast Friends site said ‘My foster family says I’m determined to check out everything.’ It was this that attracted Fiji’s new family to her. Fiji will not disappoint.
If I were to describe a perfect family and living condition for Fiji it would fit her new home to a tee. She has another grey to play with in a great big yard and doting parents. Plus the dry climate in Reno will serve her well as she seemed a touch allergic to something in the air here.
Here is Fiji on the treadmill – with a special appearance by rising star Zoe.
Tucker’s Canon Rock cover
My son just posted a cover of the famous Canon Rock on YouTube:
Creature comforts for Manila users making the switch to WordPress
I have configured WordPress with a little PHP to provide a few Manila-like features for my conversion clients. ‘Edit this page’ buttons on pages and posts and template modules. Template modules are containers in the page templates that can be edited in-place by site admins. A simple ‘Editors Only’ bar that, although adapted for WordPress functions, gives up-front site admin interface that Manila users are accustomed to.
And due to popular demand a simple ‘Shortcuts’ like WordPress plugin for linking to pages created on your WordPress site. Not really a full-blown glossary-table style system like Manila’s, rather a simple lookup of any quoted text against the currently available pages on your site. If the quoted text matches a story title, the text turns in to a link to that story.
So, if you had a page in your site with the titled Spring Cleaning and you put that string in to quotes like this – "Spring Cleaning" – as WpordPress serves your page the text turns in to a link. See the Manila Shortcuts plugin.
Major improvements made to Manila conversion process
It has been a long time since I have delivered an update here – but the Manila conversion process has had numerous improvements in the last year.
Huge numbers of rendering bugs have been squashed. Much more of the original Manila site context is no preserved. For example:
- The Manila Site Structure is now translated in to the WordPress Parent/Child structure. The only limitation is that Manila supported multiple paths to the same story, WordPress only supports one path, so only the first Manila path defined is exported to the WordPress hierarchy.
- Discussion group threads are exported to static html pages. On converted Manila pages, posts and home pages where comments were posted, a link is added to the new comment archives.
- Manila navbar converted to support the MenuBar plugin – I add the plugin to the converted site and some css to support the converted navbar.
- Manila ‘includeMessage()’ macro conversion. I can patch in some simple php code to add these to the converted theme so that areas of the sidebar can be edited, just like the Manila feature.
- Manila theme conversion. Okay I do this by hand. using the Yahoo YUI css framework. While these themes are not nearly as advanced as some of the many themes available for WordPress, they are usually an improvement from the Manila theme they came from.
- And the best news – a storyReader$nn style redirector. For links to your old Manila ‘stories’ from around the net where custom paths were not used, and instead Manila’s old /stories/storyReader$55 style url were used. These links now forward to their correct WordPress URL. This is done via a lookup on your mySQL database and so can support large numbers of redirects efficiently. This is a major step to fighting some of the link-rot that can occur when making a conversion like this.
Manila conversion winners and losers
A posted a page to try to give a summary of exactly happens to each type of data stored in a Manila site as it is converted to it’s similar WordPress counterpart: What is converted and what is left behind. Please let me know if I missed anything, thank you.
UPDATED! Many new features in the conversion system have been added allowing the conversion of Manila discussion posts, Manila Site Structure (Manila ‘Custom paths’), Manila ‘includeMessage()’ and theme modules and a new database driven re-director for Manila storyReader$nn style links to their converted WordPress counterparts. Good news!