Dec 09
New Content Management System
I’ve been using an extremely customized blog template from blogger.com for a while now. I was using blogger’s interface to compose my blogs, then ftp’ing just the blog comments (no formatting or template html) to my server. Then I used php’s “require_once” to pull the comments into my page content. It worked pretty well, but I was looking for an all-inclusive CMS (and didn’t really want to create one from scratch), so I just moved to a WordPress installation. So far, I really like it. We’ll see how it goes.
I did have to jump thru a few hoops to get my old content working with WordPress, because:
- I wanted to make sure links from the old site still work with WordPress AND
- I didn’t want to lose comments from the old guestbook.
This actually turned out to be fairly easy. To fix old links not working, I used Apache’s mod_rewrite to rewrite the old urls to the new urls.
My old guestbook system (I wrote it several years ago) stored all comments in plain text files. I wrote a quick php function to read all of these text files and generate the sql code needed to insert the old comments into the comments table used by WordPress.
As part of the new CMS, I’ve also moved from my home-grown photo album to the Coppermine Photo Gallery, because it provides easy integration between the CMS and the photo album.
I’m still working on moving my pictures over to the new photo gallery, so please be patient. Some of the links to specific pictures won’t work until I get everything moved over.
