Shaking the bush boss, shaking the bush!
I have several good clients waiting patiently to get their Manila sites moved to Wordpress - don’t worry I’m smashing forward every night.
My latest progress includes getting images and now stories exported with the process. I am also seeing the URLs cross reference information being rendered correctly, for a Manila story for example there could be at least two, maybe more possible URLs:
- www.manilaSite.com/stories/storyreader$551
- www.manilaSite.com/myNewPuppy (custom path)
- www.manilaSite.com/critters/MyNewPuppy (second custom path to same story - possible)
- more custom paths…
At this point I am getting the first two - before I’m done I had better go back thru the Manila site’s custom site paths and clean up all the other references to each story.
Also i am building a shadow-glossary with new WordPress URLs for the export process as I go. This is a table of URLs matched to Manila ‘Shortcuts.’ I use this shadow glossary to resolve Manila Shortcut style links in content as I render it for export to the target WordPress site. In English this means that embedded Manila shortcuts will point to their new WordPress URLs after the conversion (this is needed because links like www.manilaSite.com/stories/storyreader$551 will look like www.manilaSite.com/?p=443 for example).
Since I am exporting each bit of content as it was input, and rebuilding the glossary in that same order, it opens the possibility that a user may have added an image or story after a post, then went back to the post to add the shortcut. This is a time travel issue I am going to have to address - no idea yet how to handle this with my chosen route but I’m sure I’ll come up with something…
More updates as I go - keep you eye on this spot!
Tags: Manila WordPress conversion, Userland Manila, WordPress
October 12th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Trust me, not only do users add a short cut later, they will edit the shortcut later and create near duplicates (mydogpict1 and MyDogPict) pointing to the same image/gem/post . I use a similar “glossary” aka hash or map. Quite a few of them actually and they get used in multiple passes with a bewildering number of temp files from one pass to another. Users make shortcuts that never worked. They code around bugs in Manila that were later fixed and the work around now fails should they ever visit their old post their Manila server..
There’s more edge cases in Manila than any piece of software I know. You’ll have to decide how many of them you’ll handle, IFF the customer will ever notice. Perfect conversion isn’t possible. One Business model to another you have to figure out what your willing to do about these edge cases.
Best of luck.