Erin Clerico's Blog

I think I am ready to start the official testing phase – the shakedown is nearly complete. What’s the difference between shaking down new software and testing it? Before the hunt for the real bugs in a semi-biggy process like this, one must fire it up and let it run top to bottom on a few sites and see if any nuts or bolts fall out. Nail the easy bugs first. The hunt for the fun bugs, the tough ones is when the real testing starts.

The process is running front to back on a large, complex site as I blog this.

Lots of bugs have been whacked this last weekend, the converted site product still has a few too many warts to declare then end of the shakedown period.

Tomorrow I will take on a second site, another news-post oriented site. My feeling is that this process will do a better job on news-post, or blogging oriented Manila sites.

Brochure type Manila sites – with a deep site structure for example, won’t convert as well in the first version. I will try out the process on a brochure type site before I’m done.

No one ever told me porting Manila to WordPress was going to be this much fun!

I hit a limit on my method of fetching Manila Gems (Files in later versions of Manila) and posting them proper into a WordPress site at around three megs. The script hit a file of 8 megs and I discovered that Manila would not parse the xml-rpc request for a file that size.

I elected to have the WordPress site try to fetch the gem, and then post it into the WordPress site directly.

My script calls the WordPress site via xml-rpc, and gives it the URL of the gem. WordPress processes this command and then returns the new URL – which my Manila script will store along side the original url so we might be able to forward traffic to the new address of the gem. This is all via a custom api I have put together specifically to assist the site conversion, in case your wondering how I get WordPress to do these unnatural things.

As simple as all that sounds, it’s less than attractive hack (it does work however) – so I think I’ll call this one a tie and move on.

I have selected another Manila site I host, www.londonpoolscampaign.com as a pre-testing test victim and found quite more than a few of member problems. in addition to the remnants of some sort of mass member creation fiasco (lots of consistently malformed member logins), it looks like there there were tons of members created with no record of a login. This is the result of Manila site owners enabling a poorly conceived commenting system called ‘Radio Hosting.’

This feature invited tons of abuse by comment spammers, and so I am inclined to leave these members and their comments behind, as a site that has been abuse can run in to tens of thousands of members like this. Please feel free to shout me down (okay don’t really shout, I’m a sensitive kinda guy) on this point.

Also I have opted to leave out members who have not logged in for two years or more. This may indeed be harsh – again please feel free to debate this with me. Any content posted by one of these expired users, will be the property of the admin on the new WordPress site.

So here are today’s changes to exporting members from a Manila site to a WordPress site:

1. You have a login, but have never logged in? Your out.

2. You have not logged in for the last two years? Your out. Your posts become property of the new admin.

Update: see the new chart ‘A close examination of exporting Manila members to WordPress‘ that I just posted.

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 got a great note this morning from Cecil Coupe introducing himself and pointing me to a site he has set up to promote another means of converting Manila to WordPress – MvManila. This is yet another approach to getting Manila content unstuck. From what I have read on his site he has a good handle on the problem and has put forth an excellent solution.

This is good for Manila users – we now have three ways to go each with their own trade-offs to consider. My process won’t be perfect and Cecil or Jason’s solutions are good alternatives, each with their own challenges. The long and the short of this is that if you feel trapped with tons of posts in a Manila site and want out – there is help available!

One difference between out efforts is that I am not planning on releasing my code. In part because with total control over the Manila server and the WordPress install I have more flexibility, such as extending the WordPress API to allow for XML-RPC calls that otherwise don’t exist. I am not going to put in the time needed to take such code to a level that it could be released.

This will be a coin-operated service at Weblogger – I’m thinking maybe $79.95 to convert a Manila site with my process that includes a free year of WordPress hosting on our servers. A client would have to get me their Manila root file for me to do this, this can be done using a standard Manila backup feature. One caveat will be that the site’s GEMs must still be on-line from their old host for the move, as GEMs are not embedded in a Manila site’s database (the way Manila pictures, or images are).

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.

It was on this day 11 years ago that the domain ‘weblogger.com’ was registered by me and my little hosting experiment was off and running.

I am currently rebuilding all that is Weblogger and I hope we will see a revival and a fresh new face on the business soon!

Weblogger will soon be re-born as a WordPress/WPMU hosting company. Speaking of which – thats what I’m working on right now – better get back to it.

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.