Thread

Hi, guys: 

Yes, unbelievably, it’s me, back again.  I’m like a bloody soap opera.  When we last left our intrepid heroine, she had:

1.  Upgraded to 2.1.3;
2.  got an account at EH;
3.  Purchased an EE theme from Woo (big mistake—more later);
4.  Purchased tags from solspace;
5.  Purchased DataGrab from Andrew;

And proceeded to set up her replacement site (for the WP site that Hindenburg’ed after I got whacky with my EE 1.6.8 site).  I did NOT migrate the 1.6.8 site to EH; just planned to do an all-NEW, better-looking site.

So, of course, that’s gone horribly wrong (do you guys get the giggles when you read my stuff?  Do you want to murder me?).  The plan went awry when:

1.  Learned to my horror that the geniuses at Woo set up their entire portfolio/gallery so you cannot FTP images to it; it only uses images that you upload, ONE AT A TIME, through blog entries, and,
2.  Can’t get DG to work AT ALL.  Doesn’t seem to be able to recognize the XML file. Waiting to hear from Andrew, but I’ve seen other folks on his forum with similar problems with their xml files. {sigh}. 

OK, so, here’s what I’ve decided to do:  bite yet another bullet and migrate my 1.6.8 site templates, etc., to my 2.1.3 site. Yes, I know I’m doing it backwards, that I should have migrated the 1.6.8 site and THEN installed the new EE atop…but I didn’t.  And, before I found out that the dreaded WooTheme wouldn’t work, I’d already stuck in 100+ categories, which I’d as soon not have to redo, if possible.

So, question:  is there ANY REASON WHY my template groups, from 1.6.8, can’t just be recreated and installed at the 2.1.3 site, or do I have to regex them to death to change weblog to channel, or…?  Is this such a major PITA that I should copy the whole 1.6.8 site,  reinstall it on EH, and then reinstall 2.1.3 on top of it?  @SueCrocker, since migration is your specialty, any insight into this?  (Can I try DG for the content from the 1.6.8 site?)

And, lastly (for this 5 minutes):  is there ANY gallery module ANYWHERE that actually really finally works without too much brain-damage?  Where I can simply select an image from an existing gallery for a post/entry, and display the Portfolio/Gallery separately?  (Categorization would be a plus, but isn’t absolutely necessary).  The last time I tried to work with 1.6.8’s Gallery, it was a disaster, so….????  I’m asking because I produce eBooks; I’d like to be able to create posts that feature an ebook’s cover, AND be able to display all my eBook covers, like a portfolio, on the site as well.  If I can additionally tag/categorize those covers in the Gallery, so that people could sort them, that would just be gravy, if doable.  (I do the first bit—display the covers with their appropriate posts—on my 1.6.8 site…but never was able to get a gallery working that would display them as a portfolio…and part of the reason I left EE in the first place was just so I didn’t have to manually create and resize every image twice for every post, which gets mighty burdensome when you’re pushing out 20-30 books a week that need posts, announcements, etc.)

Thanks for your forbearance in answering these questions.  I really would be very, very happy to go away and stop bothering you, if I could get this thing working….

Thx,
Hitch

As far as Datagrab goes, have you tried importing an RSS feed? Slightly different way to approach things.

You still have your 1.6.8 site up, right? That’s the RSS feed I’d use. This way you don’t have to fiddle with categories. (Assuming you migrated the same categories.)

As far as your templates go, how elaborate are they? It may just be a matter of replacing exp:weblog:entries with exp:channel:entries and the like.

Or just have EH get you a new db and use that db to store your 1.6.8 site. Which may be a better choice. Were you saving templates on 1.6.8?

I don’t use Woothemes, but when you say pick an item from an existing gallery, are you meaning the EE1.6.8 gallery you have now?

As far as Datagrab goes, have you tried importing an RSS feed? Slightly different way to approach things.

No, I’d tried to use my book catalog (I keep an xml catalog of my completed books in Calibre) as the import.  I don’t have a viable RSS feed of the complete data on the WP site, because it will only export a “page” at a time, which means…hell, I don’t know, 20 “pages?”

You still have your 1.6.8 site up, right? That’s the RSS feed I’d use. This way you don’t have to fiddle with categories. (Assuming you migrated the same categories.)

Yes.  I can try that, although I’ve added about 80 categories since I’d last updated that site. 

As far as your templates go, how elaborate are they? It may just be a matter of replacing exp:weblog:entries with exp:channel:entries and the like.

Basically, they’re pretty simple—most of the “guts” use Boyink’s code from his 1.6.x tutorials, essentially. 

Or just have EH get you a new db and use that db to store your 1.6.8 site. Which may be a better choice. Were you saving templates on 1.6.8?

No, I was still slogging along with the templates inside EE.  Which in hindsight, wasn’t so smart, because I could fix them super-fast if I had them OUTSIDE of EE, in NoteTab Pro, but…{shrug}, I guess you can’t have everything. 

I don’t use Woothemes, but when you say pick an item from an existing gallery, are you meaning the EE1.6.8 gallery you have now?

I don’t have an “existing” EE 1.6.8 Gallery; I was never able to get it working attractively enough to use it, (which was partly why I left EE in the first place).  John Henry Donovan had a toot up on a modified EE Gallery, which I’d tried to emulate, but that went Tango Uniform also. So, in short:  never was able to get an EE Gallery up and running.  Never was able to have an environment in which I could “import” an image (for lack of a better word) from an existing gallery for an entry, nor, in the inverse, upload an image into a weblog and resize the thumb on the fly and have it work.  I was always stuck with resizing an image twice, manually, and then putting it and its path (yes, I used site_url, everyone, thanks) into the weblog entries for display.  Basically, my weblogs were set up to display a thumb of a book cover on one page, within an author category, but then display a larger version of the same image for the actual entry, post, whatever, about the BOOK.  As I said—I copied Boyink’s toot, essentially, except that my “products” were converted books, and my “services” were the type of book conversion, and my categories were authors (and type of conversion).

You can see my completely not-updated EE site here:  http://www.booknook.biz (yes, that’s a redirect), which is the one I built using Boyink’s toots, but got tired of the effort to create even one entry (with the image issues); you can see my Hindenburg’ed WP site at http://www.northofcarefree.com/wordpress, and the new, EH-site isn’t really worth discussing, but I have it on a temp URL at http://www.ebookconversion.biz at EH.  It has a gallery, similar to what I’d like in the long haul (from which one may “suck” images into entries, and vice-versa…I think they use TeenyThumb?)...but really, I am rather amazed myself that I managed to get into this utterly bollixed situation.  It’s a beauty.  (Please, no laughing at my pathetic template at my EE 1.6.8 site…I’m not a web designer). 

So, at this point, I guess I’m stuck essentially re-creating the site by hand; so my last question is:  IS there a real gallery module/addon/plugin, whatever, that will make my life a little easier, so I can update my posts (books) without all the brain-damage?  At least, I think that’s my question.

Thanks, Sue.

Hitch

So, at this point, I guess I’m stuck essentially re-creating the site by hand; so my last question is:  IS there a real gallery module/addon/plugin, whatever, that will make my life a little easier, so I can update my posts (books) without all the brain-damage?  At least, I think that’s my question.

Well, for one thing, you don’t need to fiddle with PHPThumb or the like, there is a third party offering called CEImage that helps immensely. It’ll resize for you on the fly.

As far as your Calibre xml file, I can’t help too much with that.. Andrew should be able to assist there. I know he released a new beta, but it didn’t help, right?

You can still export your older templates as text files from inside your EE1.x site, and then use those text files to work on your 2.x site.

Also take a look at what is available from DevDemon

As an aside.. can you convert .lit to .mobi ?

So, at this point, I guess I’m stuck essentially re-creating the site by hand; so my last question is:  IS there a real gallery module/addon/plugin, whatever, that will make my life a little easier, so I can update my posts (books) without all the brain-damage?  At least, I think that’s my question.

Well, for one thing, you don’t need to fiddle with PHPThumb or the like, there is a third party offering called CEImage that helps immensely. It’ll resize for you on the fly.

As far as your Calibre xml file, I can’t help too much with that.. Andrew should be able to assist there. I know he released a new beta, but it didn’t help, right?

You can still export your older templates as text files from inside your EE1.x site, and then use those text files to work on your 2.x site.

Also take a look at what is available from DevDemon

As an aside.. can you convert .lit to .mobi ?

Howdy:

I’m not quite as spastic as it might sound, with all that flailing about; I resize entire galleries of covers all at once…what I was trying to avoid, if possible, is that my channel entries at this moment in time use a full-size image and a “thumb,” both of which I ftp and then put urls to, in the entry itself…what I’m trying to say is I can’t BROWSE to an existing image in a gallery (or subdir or whatever) and click it, and have it auto-resize for the entry based upon where it is viewed, although I do use imgsizer for teeny images in sidebars.  I was looking at DevDemon’s gallery, as Solspace’s doesn’t seem to have come up to 2.x yet, but it’s not clear to me (idiot alert!) whether it can actually make a GALLERY, also, above and beyond a pretty cool image-handling mechanism. 

I did use Andrew’s DG…we finally got it mostly working, although I had a rather laughable disaster when I forgot to think about the fact that my categories have commas IN them (Author Last Name, First Name), which let me spend a LOTTA time deleting unwanted categories.  FWIW, anyone following this lame thread, REMOVE the trailing slash from the XML path (not the url path). 

I’ve decided to just do it the old-fashioned way…bring over my templates, run ‘em through NoteTab Pro first, regex ‘em, and build the whole thing on the 2.1.3 site…I have Boyink’s book, (in epub! Hurrah!) and I’m reviewing it to see what changes I should be paying attention to, usability-wise, since my whole Coffee Cup site is based upon his 1.6.x toots. 

And, as an aside, YOU BETCHA. What may I do for you?  Happy to help if I can/may.  After all, you’ve been listening to me whine for almost 5 years now (hard to believe I’m still this inept, isn’t it?  In fairness, I didn’t really start using it until Spring of last year, and that was 1.6.8…)

Best,
Hitch

Hi Hitch,

Sounds like you’re on your way towards a solution but I’ll leave this open in case anything else crops up.

You can still export your older templates as text files from inside your EE1.x site, and then use those text files to work on your 2.x site.

 

Hi, I’ve searched the forums, etc., but maybe I missed a quick-n-dirty solution—is there a way to do this all at once, or am I stuck with one-by-one, as in the “save as flat files” solution?

Hitch

Hitch,

you can export a whole group of templates in EE1.x. See attached