Here is the flowchart depicting the process I am building for converting a Userland Manila site to WordPress.

Manila to WordPress Conversion PDF

Most of what is shown is actually coded, I am currently debugging and trying to think up obsure Manila objects that could yet be converted.

My experience with the native language of Frontier has been a huge help to this effort - there are actually a couple of tricky issues I had to overcome with Manila and WordPress to make this possible. You WordPress developers will see that there are XML-RPC calls I show that do not exist, I had to extend the architecture. A pretty straight forward affair if you know your way around the WP code base.

Ahhh the smell of fresh procedural code in the evening… smells like… time that could have been spent getting more done in an object oriented environment.

One of the bad habits I’ve picked up working as a lone-wolf is my approach to limited-use, batch process-oriented code. I tend to build these huge sweaty inline monsters, with little worry about beauty or serviceability. Knowing almost everything I need to know about the language I’m working with, the last challenge becomes building a large app top to bottom, then firing it up without prior testing to see how few defects I coded. There have been moderately complex apps I have done this with where it ran perfectly the first time, but for the most part there are usually a couple things I will mess up.

The current large batch processing app occupying most of my off-time is of course the Manila-to-WordPress-O-Matic and today I pretty much finished every part of the program, looked it over a bit and decided to start in on debugging the code. Suffice it to say I am apparently pretty rusty on my UserTalk skills by the towering defects in the process, only about 10% of which I could not have seen coming. Oh well, good thing I got on this before I forgot how to code Frontiel altogether.

At this point the code creates, on the WordPress site, all needed member logins, creates all news post categories and posts all Manila Gems to WordPress uploads.

More soon.

Manila Gems have always been messy to move from one host to another. Gems (or Files in a recent Manila upgrade) are smply files that a Manila site master has uploaded. Usually everything other than images - pdf, doc, xls ect., but not specifically excluding images. As it turns out, the same XML-RPC API cal for posting images to WordPress will also work for Manila Gems.

Manila treats images and gems quite differently, to WordPress they are all just uploads. Much much bettah.

So the Weblogger Manila to WordPress conversion will include all the sites gems! This is good news.

Wow, I started Weblogger almost 11 years ago - the official birthday will be this next Friday, October 5th.

Our first server was actually a tired old Macintosh PowerMac 7200 with 256MB ram, running WebStar as an fcgi front end forUserland Frontier - there was no Manila back then so I hosted a few discussion groups using a lightweight forum built in to Frontier.

My little company (we really are a mom and pop) is actually undergoing a transition to offer WordPress and WPMU hosting. Actually every part of Weblogger is currently being reborn. I am re-doing all of our business internals, moving to a new hosted blogging platform, redoing our e-commerce from scratch - the whole enchilada.

I want to use this blog to highlight added value we are planning to bring to WordPress and particularly WPMU hosting. THe fact is that much of what WPMU does we did with Weblogger ISP tools years ago. I am used to dealing with this type of community softtware and may yet still have a trick or two up my sleeve when it comes to devising cool tools for community weblog hosting.

I’m working on a better mousetrap to recycle old Manila blogs in to spiffy new WordPress blogs. It’s all experimental at this point, but I have made great strides and will soon release a new service for Manila user who wish to convert to WordPress over at Weblogger very soooon…

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