Archive for the ‘Manila to WordPress Conversion’ Category

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Creature comforts for Manila users making the switch to WordPress

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

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.

wp_editors_only_bar

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.

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Major improvements made to Manila conversion process

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

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.

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Manila conversion winners and losers

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

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!

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Manila conversion tool shakedown almost complete

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

I think I am ready to start the official testing phase – the shakedown is nearly complete. What’s the difference between shaking down new software and testing it? Before the hunt for the real bugs in a semi-biggy process like this, one must fire it up and let it run top to bottom on a few sites and see if any nuts or bolts fall out. Nail the easy bugs first. The hunt for the fun bugs, the tough ones is when the real testing starts.

The process is running front to back on a large, complex site as I blog this.

Lots of bugs have been whacked this last weekend, the converted site product still has a few too many warts to declare then end of the shakedown period.

Tomorrow I will take on a second site, another news-post oriented site. My feeling is that this process will do a better job on news-post, or blogging oriented Manila sites.

Brochure type Manila sites – with a deep site structure for example, won’t convert as well in the first version. I will try out the process on a brochure type site before I’m done.

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Limits encountered on Gems exporting

Friday, October 19th, 2007

No one ever told me porting Manila to WordPress was going to be this much fun!

I hit a limit on my method of fetching Manila Gems (Files in later versions of Manila) and posting them proper into a WordPress site at around three megs. The script hit a file of 8 megs and I discovered that Manila would not parse the xml-rpc request for a file that size.

I elected to have the WordPress site try to fetch the gem, and then post it into the WordPress site directly.

My script calls the WordPress site via xml-rpc, and gives it the URL of the gem. Wordpress processes this command and then returns the new URL – which my Manila script will store along side the original url so we might be able to forward traffic to the new address of the gem. This is all via a custom api I have put together specifically to assist the site conversion, in case your wondering how I get WordPress to do these unnatural things.

As simple as all that sounds, it’s less than attractive hack (it does work however) – so I think I’ll call this one a tie and move on.

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More pre-testing testing reveals Manila member woes

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

I have selected another Manila site I host, www.londonpoolscampaign.com as a pre-testing test victim and found quite more than a few of member problems. in addition to the remnants of some sort of mass member creation fiasco (lots of consistently malformed member logins), it looks like there there were tons of members created with no record of a login. This is the result of Manila site owners enabling a poorly conceived commenting system called ‘Radio Hosting.’

This feature invited tons of abuse by comment spammers, and so I am inclined to leave these members and their comments behind, as a site that has been abuse can run in to tens of thousands of members like this. Please feel free to shout me down (okay don’t really shout, I’m a sensitive kinda guy) on this point.

Also I have opted to leave out members who have not logged in for two years or more. This may indeed be harsh – again please feel free to debate this with me. Any content posted by one of these expired users, will be the property of the admin on the new WordPress site.

So here are today’s changes to exporting members from a Manila site to a WordPress site:

1. You have a login, but have never logged in? Your out.

2. You have not logged in for the last two years? Your out. Your posts become property of the new admin.

Update: see the new chart ‘A close examination of exporting Manila members to WordPress‘ that I just posted.

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A re-think on the order of exporting and URLs

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Cecil re-enforced the point about not having a good Manila glossary to render new shortcuts from the new WordPress (WP) URLs for each story discussed earlier. He’s right, and this has brought about a major shift in the process here. This is important as this is the mechanism that will make sure your links in all your content that point to your own site sill still work after the conversion.

On one hand I want a table of old Manila URLs matched to new URLs, and the only way I can see to do this is to plow thru the Manila site in the exact order it was created – message one then message two then three etc. The trouble is that the glossary is not of a chronological nature. And he’s right, users go in and mess with it all the time.

So here’s the new plan – please hold your nose and remember, reshaping a large amount of complex, interrelated data in to a new schema never designed to house it is by nature a kludgey, messy operation – best to accept homely solutions (and refer to them as ‘novel approaches’) and just move on.

I’ll make one complete pass over all stories, home pages, images, GEMs and news items, accumulating new WordPress URLs for each resource as I go.

When that is complete, and I know the whole truth about every URL in the old glossary and have a new glossary against which I will re-render every Manila story and home page and then post the result as an update to each already existing WordPress page. Remember, this should only be necessary for Manila stories and home pages, possibly discussion posts as replies to home pages and stories since Manila ‘news posts’ do not render shortcuts or Manila macros.

Only a little easier said then done, and I know what your thinking but remember — this a ‘novel approach…’

I updated the flowchart to document this insanity – should have the code actually doing this shortly.

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Shaking the bush boss, shaking the bush!

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

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!

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Another alternative for converting a Manila site

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I got a great note this morning from Cecil Coupe introducing himself and pointing me to a site he has set up to promote another means of converting Manila to WordPress – MvManila. This is yet another approach to getting Manila content unstuck. From what I have read on his site he has a good handle on the problem and has put forth an excellent solution.

This is good for Manila users – we now have three ways to go each with their own trade-offs to consider. My process won’t be perfect and Cecil or Jason’s solutions are good alternatives, each with their own challenges. The long and the short of this is that if you feel trapped with tons of posts in a Manila site and want out – there is help available!

One difference between out efforts is that I am not planning on releasing my code. In part because with total control over the Manila server and the WordPress install I have more flexibility, such as extending the WordPress API to allow for XML-RPC calls that otherwise don’t exist. I am not going to put in the time needed to take such code to a level that it could be released.

This will be a coin-operated service at Weblogger – I’m thinking maybe $79.95 to convert a Manila site with my process that includes a free year of WordPress hosting on our servers. A client would have to get me their Manila root file for me to do this, this can be done using a standard Manila backup feature. One caveat will be that the site’s GEMs must still be on-line from their old host for the move, as GEMs are not embedded in a Manila site’s database (the way Manila pictures, or images are).

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Charting the process

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

I have chalked up a quick flowchart depicting the Manila to WordPress conversion process for the soon to be relaunched Weblogger WordPress Hosting service.

Manila to WordPress Conversion PDF

Enjoy!

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