I have a project I am working on. I am building a new site for a one person business using Evo 1.0.4. The owner has an existing site that runs on Textpattern. She would like to bring in some of her content posts from this system into the new site (via MODx Ditto blog setup etc).
Any tips on how to do this? This is uncharted waters for me. I would like to archive her entire site first. We will be using the same URL with the new MODx site so all the old Texpattern files must go. Is there a way we could copy all the Texpattern files and then be able to figure out the highlights and present them as MODx documents?
Thanks!
No way that I know of. I have used Textpattern a bit, but I don’t recall what the database looks like. If the "textile" language is included in the content, then that’s definitely a hurdle to importing stuff. Basically to pull that off I think you’d need to be an SQL whiz and pretty sharp on how databases work to find equivalent fields and that sort of thing. If that’s not the case, you may be in for some hand-copying. In any case, site_content is one of the MODx tables you’ll need to look at.
Textpattern is quite different, indeed. I like its very small size, and its admin is decent. I really had trouble figuring out how to get menu structures happening and other site structuring, although forum members were helpful. I remember wanting to simply generate a menu from some documents, and until a kindly forum member provided me with some code, I wouldn’t have had any idea. Wayfinder, the MODx menu app, totally crushes any other CMS menu plugin I’ve run into. I got the Textpattern book, too, which is now quietly resting, waiting for someone to use it.
There’s one guy here, David M, who had used Textpattern a lot. If you do a forum search on "textpattern", his stuff will come up. Who knows, maybe there’s some database info somewhere that will help you.
Thanks!
Way back when I was sorting out which CMS was for me I tried Textpattern. Actually I tried several applications while following a book called "web blog solutions" or something like that. The chapter on Textpattern was pretty decent as I recall. Of course I dumped everything once I discovered MODx.
Last night I tried to register with the Textpattern forum but could not even get that accomplished for some reason. At the very least It would be nice to create one large text file from all her Textpattern posts and then create some kind of "highlight real" from that that then could be added into MODx.
I can see I have more digging to do. I tried doing a google search on "Textpattern to MODx" but the results were disappointing...
I tried again to register with Textpattern but I get a server error.
My thinking now is to backup the database table from the Textpattern site, install Textpattern locally using MAMP and add the database content from the old site into the fresh install. This way we will still have all the content in its native Textpattern form. From there it might be a lot of cutting and pasting to bring the highlights into MODx. Obviously I want the MODx template CSS to rule and not the styling from Textpattern. I am hoping that this process will sort of become a spring cleaning opportunity as quite a bit of the content is off topic...
How weird that their forum is down. If Textpattern isn’t dumb enough to have added loads of inline styles or stupid stuff like font tags, styling that content in MODx should be no problem. And I hope for your sake that they don’t have "textile" tags in there, but they very well might. You’ll see when you examine the raw data.
I’m glad to see that you have the necessary tech skills. Most questions I see like this (and on other forums where I go) are really seeking a Magic Converter that will instantly do the whole thing with absolutely no manual work.
So bid a little high on this job - it could be a pain.
I tried to register twice using different email addresses on two different days but could not overcome a server glitch.
Other than that I have none any work recently with this task. This week I need to get something done...
If you’re gonna do it the old fashioned way of cutting and pasting content from one CMS to another, you might want to use something like FlashDevelop and use the Regex find/replace tool to clean up the code.
Quote from: diatomin at Dec 20, 2010, 06:59 AM
If you’re gonna do it the old fashioned way of cutting and pasting content from one CMS to another, you might want to use something like FlashDevelop and use the Regex find/replace tool to clean up the code.
That’s a pretty good point. And "Paste from Word" in Tiny editor can be your friend. I also remember one time doing a really big and tedious data entry task, when I used this to clean and re-format:
http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-text-html.php
