In my previous post I described a one-brick-at-a-time approach for moving the content of a Manila site to a WordPress site. Just how am I planing on doing this you ask?
I’m going to use yet another Dave Winer invention, XML-RPC. This is a pretty heavy concept for non-programmers, so I’ll try to explain what this means in simple terms.
When you load your blog into your browser and log in to make a post – you are really just feeding some inputs (the title of the post, the post, links etc) in to a program, order ‘code’ that saves the post in to a database. When you view your post, it has been read from a database – fed thru some other part of your blogging program to display the post on your screen.
Most blogging platforms have a series of ‘hooks’ that activate some of the same code that you use through your browser. Programmers often refer to these ‘hooks’ as APIs (Application Program Interface). This means I can write a program and use it to post to my blog via it’s APIs – that is I don’t have to use a browser – I could script an automatic process to make a post to my blog every time my laptop wakes up, for example.
This is where XML-RPC comes in. WordPress has a set of APIs – which use a standard called XML-RPC to carry the inputs and return the results to my custom laptop opening program.
Now one more leap here – I can program a Frontier/Manila server to read a Manila post out of the Manila database – and post it to a WordPress blog automatically. If I set up the program to ratchet thru each Manila post – make some decisions about the nature of the post (a news post, a page, an image etc) – package it up according to XML-RPC and WordPress API standards and posting it to the WordPress blog I want to move to.
This is how I plan on moving a Manila site brick-by-brick to a new WordPress site.
