Erin Clerico

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.

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!

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!

I have started up the debugging process on the Manila to WordPress conversion process.

So far we have all members from the Manila site being created remotely, complete with WordPress style logins - which can’t be e-mail addresses. My sollution has been to take the Manila e-mail login, take the ‘@’ sign and any other non-alphas like periods etc out - making John Doe’s Yahoo address into ‘johndoeyahoocom’ for John’s WordPress login. If John was a Managing Editors, or some other level of editor, hi role on the WordPress site is set at the same operational level.

We also have all Manila New Item Departments being created on the target site, so when we post all the Manila News Items they will have the same categories on the Wordpress site.

Manila Gems, if available from the Gems static server, are being uploaded to WordPress properly and their old URLs are stored with their new WordPress orient URLs so we can do some re-direction magic on the new server. This is nice, keeps old bookmarks, links and search engine referrals working, no breakage.

More to come in the next few days. I may be able to accept a few test users to get some feedback very soon. Stay tuned.

Okay, realizing there was not logical way to bring in old Manila threaded discussions was a bummer. Onward and upward. I working on mapping specific URLs from each Manila peice exported to WordPress. Stories, images etc. I am relying on the a part of the Manila database called the glossary (adrSite^.["#glossary"] just in case you do care).

Over the years managing Manila servers I can recall just enough cases of trouble with this index that I have a slight superstition about it, but we’re talking about a handful of cases years ago. Since this is a rare service request (haven’t heard about a problem in years) I think I’m gonna put my trust in this source as a reliable lookup for Manila stories and pictures.

WordPress returns enough information to calculate the new URL with each new post, story or image posted. So I just need to store the old URL and the new URL together so some future process can point traffic frm the old to the new.

Next I will need to devise the most efficient way for the WordPress site to recognize an incoming Manila link (which normally it would reject as a 404 not found) and forward the request to the the object’s new location. This way we can minimize (although not entirely eliminate) breakage for your content when you move.

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.

As I have developed the new Manila site export mechanism the have been a few little brick walls I needed to break thru to keep the process moving forward.

In my first pass over the requirements of this project I tried to do as many proof of concept runs to try to get a handle on what looked like the most difficult tasks in actually trying to export a Manila site entirely via XML-RPC to WordPress.

At the top of the list it a seemed was the fact that the call (getting techie here) ‘metaWeblog.newMediaObject’ did not seem to want to work at all with WordPress. So of course this became the very first task I undertook, since it appeared to be a show-stopper if I couldn’t lick it.

After a days or so of moderate hair pulling I finally pinpointed the problem within the Manila server.

Once I corrected the bad code it fired right up on the WordPress end and thus the chief obstacle as far as I could see at that time had been knocked off.

A move from Manila is long overdue for Weblogger. I’ve been working for some time on putting in to place everything I will need for a completely new Weblogger.com.

So many things will be better - lots of new billing automation to provide faster sales and configuration for our clients, new blogging platform, better support features - basically everything will be new from the ground up. We will still be supporting Manila hosting for as long as any of our currenty paying customers want it. I’ve been blogging about a conversion process to allow Manila users to move to WordPress, and I will offer the service for all Manila users packaged with annual WordPress hosting, so everyone wins.

The home page will soon have a new look and new marketing to reflect our transition. More on that soon.

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.