Erin Clerico's Blog

If you are a Manila site owner and considering having us port your site to WordPress – please read this carefully for a thorough understanding of what the conversion does and what it does not do.

You can also review this geeky chart for more info.

Content included in the conversion:

• All converted content retains original posting date and time, author and category where applicable.
• All Manila news categories (for blogging sites)
• All news posts. Embedded HTML within the content of a news post is retained. The distinction of released vs. non-released or published posts is retained. (Caveat: Direct links from the headlines of news posts, the way Manila formats news posts, is not possible in WP. Instead, we place the link ‘more…’ and provide the link there in the converted WP post.)
• All Manila ‘Stories’ are converted in to WP ‘Pages.’ HTML markup within page body, embedded media etc retained in exact form. (Caveat: The WP page will have a different URL from the original Manila URL for the same page. Any internal linking to that page via the Manila ‘Shortcuts’ mechanism will be corrected and will work. Bookmarked or out-linked pages will return a custom ‘page not found’ with a search link to the site help the user locate what they were looking for.)
  UPDATE – any old Manila /stories/storyReader$55 stlye inbound link will now forward to the new WordPress page URL. No more broken links to Manila story pages.
• Manila images converted to WP uploads. Any Manila image imbedded in a Manila page, via the Manila shortcuts mechanism, will be re-linked to the newly created WP upload of that image, formatting info for image will be retained in the converted version.
• Manila members of a site who have logged in at least once, and within the last two years will be imported in to the new WP site. The Manila user id convention of using an e-mail address is not supported, a new user ID for WP is calculated by simply taking out the ‘@’ and the ‘.’ This means simply that a Manila login of ’sam@tajoe.org’ would equate to ’samtajoeorg’ on the new WP site. Manila member’s editorial rights are retained as well as possible in to WP editorial rights system.
• Manila Gems (known as Files in modern Manila) are converted to WP uploads. Any links to a Gem via Manila’s shortcut system will have the link corrected to the new WP so those links continue to work. (Caveat: This does not include files uploaded via the ‘Filer’ plugin for Manila. Gems are not embedded within the Manila database, so only Gems or Files which are still available at their linked-to URL will be converted and available on the new WP site).
  Manila sites set up to ‘flip homepage’ will have a dated archive of previous home pages. These pages are converted to WP posts, since this is the most similar concept available in WordPress. All these posts go in to a ‘Home Pages’ category on the new WP site.

Content not converted:

• Discussion group posts. WP does do comments, but not threaded comments in the way that Manila does, so there is actually no place for this data to be imported in to WP. Purely discussion group posts are left behind, as well as all other types of comment posts
  UPDATE: Discussion group threads are now optionally preserved as static html files on the converted WordPress site. On converted pages and posts that had comments post on the old site, there is a link added to the comment archive.
• Navbar and Manila Modules – these objects must be re-created by hand in WordPress and is not included in this conversion process
  UPDATE: Navbars converted to support the MenuBar plugin in WordPress. Manila Modules now converted and can be simply placed into new WordPress theme.
• Trackbacks are not ported with news posts.
• No data from the plugin ‘addedValues’ is ported in to the WP database, all such data is left behind.
• Site Structure feature is not found in WP the same way it exists in WP, so specific custom paths are not converted and requests to those specific paths will return 404 errors.
  UPDATE: No longer true! Manila hierarchies are now converted to the WordPress Parent/Child hierarchy system. Only the first path for a Manila story page is converted, subsequent paths for the same page are ignored as WordPress only allows one custom path per page.
• Site design, templates and themes are not converted. Assistance is available and we can make a firm quote for this service if need be.
• Manila directories, based upon OPML, are not imported in to WP.
  UPDATE: Yes they are. Requires a plugin added to the converted site to operate, but all OPML directory data is converted and used by the WordPress plugin with the exception of linked in OPML from other sites – this is not supported.
• Manila access rules – a more recent addition to Manila – allows for granular access rights site-wide. None of these specific configurations are converted.