More Manila –> WordPress Multiuser Migration Notes
I’ve spent way too much time these last few weeks moving blogs from Manila, the platform Harvard’s Berkman Center used to offer as a blog platform, to WordPress Multiuser, the platform they’re now using. Here are a few notes to help those of you also dealing with the migration.
- Since WordPress doesn’t always deal well with the HTML coding Manila can handling, a lot of the formatting vanishes. I’ve been cheating a little by using the Web pages of what’s left of the Manila server or the backups I’ve made to just copy the HTML code and paste it into the WordPress. That can be much easier than recoding everything.
- WordPress doesn’t handle multiple contributors well in its menu to manage the people who have access to the weblog. For some reason, it only lists 1 or 2 people in each cateogory (Administrator, Editor, Author, etc.) and the names of those people don’t always show up after importing the weblog. Write to weblogmaster [at] cyber.law.harvard . edu for assistance straightening that out. Each contributor is going to need to establish a user account on the server.
- If you work on a weblog with multiple contributors, you might notice problems with authorship attributions. I’ve been going back through the new blog group blog to assign authors. It’s difficult because not only did the weblog drop some authors from the user list, but I have not yet figured out if there’s a way to edit the drop down list of authors. Because each contributor needs to establish their own account on the server and because of issues with out-of-date e-mail addresses, I’m not sure I’ll be able to add some of the former contributors to the weblog. I’ve been noting their authorship manually.
I should also note here that the Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog, aka the blog group blog, has a new URL: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggroup/ and likewise new feed URLs. The new feed URLs are: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggroup/f… http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggroup/c…. How many times have I linked to the blog group blog from this space? Ugh. Does WordPress MU offer a global find and replace feature? Heh.
