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Converting 400 pages to EE?

December 05, 2007 10:25am

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  • #1 / Dec 05, 2007 10:25am

    JohnnFour

    15 posts

    Hi,

    My existing, non-EE site has 400 pages of articles. What would be the easiest way to get those into EE? I have php functions for page top and bottom, so each file can be stripped of those, leaving just content that’s ripe for some import tool….

  • #2 / Dec 05, 2007 4:10pm

    Erin Dalzell

    790 posts

    Wow, that is a big generic question, eh?

    It really depends on what you are trying to do. EE can serve up static pages, so you could convert those 400 pages of articles into static pages. I would wager though, that that is not what you want to do.

    My guess would be you need to create a weblog to display the articles and add all the article data to the DB. Importing that data into weblog entries wouldn’t be that hard, though I am sorry to say I don’t know how to do it.

    The first steps would be to create the framework (weblogs, headers, etc) that the articles will be displayed in. Then you can import the data and it should all magically work.

    Or have I completely misunderstood your goal?

  • #3 / Dec 05, 2007 4:35pm

    JohnnFour

    15 posts

    Erin, thanks for the reply.

    Then you can import the data and it should all magically work.

    That is the crux of my question. How to import. My articles will be pure HTML using global styles. I want to avoid copying and pasting the content in one at a time, and am looking for a tool, script, or process for rapid data migration.

    Cheers,

    Johnn

  • #4 / Dec 05, 2007 4:37pm

    Erin Dalzell

    790 posts

    can you get the individual articles each in their own file or in one big file with a delimiter?

  • #5 / Dec 05, 2007 4:41pm

    Erin Dalzell

    790 posts

    Here’s some php to parse all the files in a directory:

    http://www.davidj.org/code/php_parse_title.html

  • #6 / Dec 05, 2007 4:57pm

    allgood2

    427 posts

    You’ll want some sort of import tool. EE handles the Moveable Type format best, so you could use that, or you could create your own import tool.  Though another option that might be easier is to find a site that can convert static pages to RSS, then you could use the plug-in FeedGrab.  There is also a plugin called CVSGrab by the same author which may work as well.

    I don’t know how technical you are, but here’s what I’d recommend. Start with something like FeedFlux, it’s basicall an RSS Generator for Static sites. FeedFlux isn’t the only option, in fact, if you don’t want to install or configure the software yourself, you may want to play with one of the options listed in this article on Static to RSS conversion.

    I’d then use Andrew Weaver’s excellent FeedGrab (pre-warning, the newest version isn’t linked to at the first message, so you’ll need to scroll through the various messages to get the latest.  Once the articles are in an RSS feed you can pull them over to any weblog you’ve created in EE.

    You may also want to look at CVSGrab as well as the FeedGrab Documentation

  • #7 / Dec 05, 2007 8:18pm

    JohnnFour

    15 posts

    Great, thanks for the info!


    Johnn

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