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Import a web site (5 posts)

  1. sknox
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Is there a utility to import an existing flat file web site?

    My university is looking at MU for site management and potentially we have hundreds of web sites to move. Screen scrape is less that ideal!

  2. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Hmmmm... Not really. You are going to need to script something to take the content out of each file and format it for import (assuming that each file is in a strict format).

    Is everything currently in just flat HTML files?

  3. sknox
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Yeah, everything is in flat html. These are university departments and all they've ever done is FrontPage (*gak*) or Dreamweaver (*slightly less gak*).

    I think people will be okay with migrating their sites by hand. I'm trying to pitch it as "you're going to want to re-think your site anyway" and that will be true of most, though not all.

    I just thought that if there were such an import utility, it'd sure save folks a ton of work.

    A word to the dev community here: write such a tool and be a hero. As Mu gets positioned more and more as site management, I'm sure there will be many organizations that will want to be able to do what I've described.

  4. pumpkinpatch
    Member
    Posted 16 years ago #

    Apart from the occasional FrontPage extensions issue, if its all plain html, you can create a blank theme (no borders, widgets etc). Then cut and paste into the html panel. A group demo would be ideal, and it works well because they all love sitting in meetings :)
    Then you can get a few to adopt some fancy themes, and the word will spread...
    They will eventually get the hang of it, but transition will be difficult. 20 yrs back it was getting them to use Emails, and once it started, it was a deluge.

  5. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Gotta be copy & paste... if there hasn't been such an importer developed in the past 7 years, I can't see it now.

    I still have flat html files I have to move into WP.

    It's not just a WP thing either. :)

    One thing you might want to try is do the copy/paste into one file set up like a Movable Type import file. It's highly human readable, easy for some grunt worker to follow.

    then you can import that in WP pretty easily.

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