Ruh-Roh: No place for Manila discussion group posts
Another day another quagmire in my quest to convert Manila sites to WordPress… Manila users can, and often do post item in to the discussion group as top-level threads, and then subsequent replies. Pretty typical set up for a forum type program. Trouble is WordPress is not this type of animal.
I’m afraid there is no similar shape in WordPress land - content in WordPress are pages, blog posts, comments to pages or blog posts, attachments, tackbacks… but nothing I can see that resembles just a plain old discussion forum type top-level thread.
Possibly, I could simply create a custom news category on the target WordPress site titled something like ‘Manila Discussion Group Item’ and post top-level threads there. Trouble is with that approach that discussion group posts would sprinkle in among regular WordPress style home page published posts. This seems unnatural and confusing.
In the spirit of the k-i-m-c-s approach (keep-it-moderately-complex-stupid) that is my nature, I think I’m going to drop support for this type of content. If I get strong push-back then I’ll wander into this thicket again and scare something up to export this kind of content. I guess in the meantime I’ll make this fact plainly clear in the disclaimers on this process.