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.