my a.p. hill site
Just a few words on what I’m doing with my A.P. Hill site (www.aphillcsa.com).
I finally broke. The site has become such an unwieldy mess on my hard-drive and on my server that I decided I have to move it to some sort of content management system. It is just too hard to otherwise update the beast. I am using WordPress. I am not turning the site into a blog. I’m simply using WordPress to manage a lot of material. I think WordPress can be effectively used to maintain just about any type of site — not just a traditional blog. I’m going to find out.
As far as I can tell — and please, someone step in and correct me if I’m wrong — the only way to do this is to copy and paste the site’s individual pages into WordPress. I have the material as text files, but I don’t think there is any way to get them into WordPress other than copying and pasting each individual file. As I said, if someone knows, please tell me!
Needless to say, this is a time consuming and mind-numbing effort. Copying and pasting files is about as much fun as doing document review as an attorney. I hope, however, the result will be a site that is much easier to update and maintain. Right now the site is a little bit of a mess as I work on it. I’m trying to leave it in tact as I work on the conversion.
Suggestions always welcome.
Hi Jennie,
I think you’re on the right track. We’ve just done something like this for the new SHAF site - using WP as a CMS. But that was a lot smaller than yours.
Are all your pages individual html files? I wonder if there might be a way to whack thru a bunch of files at least semi-automatically and create WP database tables (or SQL to do that) directly …
hmm.
Send me an email if you’d like to chat more, would you?
Good hunting!
Sorry Jenny - I can spell, really.
Hi Jenny,
If they’re plain .txt files, you’re pretty much stuck with the manual cut and pasting. In a way, though, I think doing it that way will help you get a better handle on the site architecture. For example, in the ‘big’ bio page, the structure is kind of…confusing. I’d suggest using a plugin like In Series (http://remstate.com/projects/in-series/) to manage that kind of content in WP (it also auto-generates a TOC.)
I’d be glad to help as well…your A.P. Hill site is what brought me in a roundabout way to your blog!
Cena
Thanks. :)
I do still have the XHTML files, as well as having almost everything on site as plain text files. I’ve been looking around for a plugin that might be able to convert either to create a mysql database, but I haven’t seen anything even close.
The site IS an architectural mess, so this will give me a chance to start cleaning it up. Since I am sort of having to reinvent the wheel anyway, I didn’t see any reason to stay with just static XHTML pages.
Currently, I’m just working on getting the individual pages into WordPress format. Then I’ll work on organizing it. Being able to use categories and tags as well as the many good plugins for organizing content should be able to make the site much more usable. As well as easier to maintain and to update.
I’ll keep thinking on it while I copy and paste. :) Thanks for the responses!