Specific Pre Written Articles: Implementation?

Are these articles MS Word documents, or ASCII text files, or scribblings on rocks? And what would you expect the plugin you’re looking for to actually do?

More information about your situation and what is required would help in figuring out if you have any options.

thanks for quick reply

Currently, these articles are inside one large Word document.
And I am not only looking for a plugin solution; anything would work. Im just looking for an easy way to incorporate them into WordPress without having to make 50 entries in a new page created from a template.

without having to make 50 entries in a new page created from a template
I am not sure I understand this… ??

Brainstorming time!

If you could get the material into the MovableType import format:

https://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/mtimport.html

You could save it all to a single text file and import it using import-mt.php. Here’s a suggested layout that should work:

TITLE: 1st Article Title
AUTHOR: Jane Smith
DATE: 06/29/2005 12:00:00 PM
CATEGORY: Articles
STATUS: publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
-----
BODY:
Content of first article. If you want a 'more' link tag in the article, place what is to go before it here, and add the rest in the EXTENDED BODY section below.
-----
EXTENDED BODY:
Here's where the rest of the article content goes. It will not appear anywhere but on the specific post page for it.
--------
TITLE: 2nd Article Title
AUTHOR: John Doe
DATE: 06/29/2005 1:00:00 PM
CATEGORY: Articles
STATUS: publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
-----
BODY:
Content of second article. If not using the 'more' link tag, place all article content here.

Still the 2nd article, just a new paragraph.
--------
TITLE: 3nd Article Title
AUTHOR: Jim Doe-Smith
DATE: 06/29/2005 2:00:00 PM
CATEGORY: Articles
STATUS: publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
-----
BODY:
Content of 3rd article, more of the same...

 
 
And so on. The key point is to separate each article with:

--------

and the article header and BODY with (note the difference in width):

-----

Notes on above:

To avoid publishing straight from import, set STATUS to:

STATUS: draft

Then you can edit and publish at your leisure. To turn off comments and pings:

ALLOW COMMENTS: 0
ALLOW PINGS: 0

If posting into more than one category, insert another CATEGORY: line for it:

CATEGORY: Articles
CATEGORY: News

It’s a good idea to provide varying times/dates for each. Also try to make sure the categor(y/ies) already exist. For authors, the import will give the option to create new user accounts for each listed author, or to select an existing user to assign articles to (each *new* author detected will generate such an option).

Finally, in regards to getting the material out of Word and into WordPress, save it as text only (and not text only with line breaks). You’ll also have to make sure there are two returns between each paragraph of text in each article’s “body”, else article content will not be correctly formatted by WordPress when displayed (single return equal br, where double return equals p (paragraph)).

wow

u wrote all that for me

thanks man, i will try that

Kafkaesqui’s solution above works wonderful! The only thing left out is that you need to start and end with a
——–
as well.

Also, if your using NotePad (like I did) to clean up your text, be sure to save the file in UTF-8 encoding. Just use the file save as drop-down box in NotePad.

I wanted to add information here and say a big thank you to those who participated in this thread. You benefited me beyond measure!

I have a huge website that’s been around for a decade. It was straight html and was laid out in tables. (Started long before CSS was around.) I decided to switch to a CMS to make it easier to maintain (it grew out of control and at times would take over my life), and to allow some others to help add materials. None of them knew how to write HTML, so it needed to be fairly intuitive

I searched and searched, but couldn’t find one that had any method of importing all the old stuff. So I chose a nice system, and began the horrible process of putting the several hundred articles in by hand. Open the file, copy the article, go to the CMS manager, paste, then sort it all out…it was awful. I’d do ten articles, then become absolutely overwhelmed at how much was left, and what a huge job this was going to be. I’d been at it for over six months, copy/pasting by hand as I had time, then feeling so overwhelmed. I thought I’d be at it for two years before I’d ever finish.

In the meantime, I set up an unrelated blog, and decided to go with Word Press. Started really loving WP and getting to know it. And then happened upon this thread.

I tinkered around, and it seemed that this just might work and I’d be able to import this stuff using the above method.

I’m here to tell you that not only did it work, it worked beautifully and the import job was done within a week….and was just plain FUN. My computer did almost all the work, and Word Press is working exactly in the way I’d hoped. It’s just glorious!!!

So I wanted to share the exact steps I used in hope of helping someone else who might wander into this thread, someone who has a huge site they want to convert.

Here’s how I imported almost all of the articles:

I spent quite a bit of time setting up my WP site in advance, getting things the way I wanted, and making sure my categories were in order.

I did sections at a time, and my old articles were all categorized, so I went by category. The old articles also had code to output print-friendly, and the merge program may have found that helpful. I don’t know. All I know is that it all worked beautifully.

1. I found a program called Amber Text Merger to merge my html pages into a plain text document. I use Mac, but it worked just fine using Virtual PC. It’s an easy program to use, and you choose/import the files, then output as an ANSI txt file. I imported 20-30 files at a time, just to play it safe in case there was a problem. (There never was) There’s a trial version of this software, but for a big job, it’s well worth the price of 19.95! I can’t emphasize enough how fantastic this piece of software was, and how crucial in this job.

So: Add files (choose html assuming you have html files), then Save As txt.

2. Take the merged txt file, and you’ll need to add Kafkaesqui’s stuff here. If using the trial version of Amber, you’ll have to do find/replace and strip out the Trial Version words. Then, at the top is a list of the files, remove that, and each imported article has the word “Top” in it. (To send you back to the top, but there’s no link). The word Top also has a bunch of extra lines in it, and this is what I used as my “find” to find and replace with the Movable Type code. I used Mac OS X’s automator to do most of the find/replace stuff. So find Top (and some of those lines), replace with:

——–
TITLE: title
AUTHOR: admin
DATE: 08/17/2006 12:00:00
CATEGORY: News
STATUS: publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
PING STATUS: 1
—–
BODY:

Then I did manually go through each one and copy/pasted (or actually cut/pasted) the headline/title from article to replace “title”

Note that I also changed ALLOW PINGS to PING STATUS because that worked. I did this all on WP version 2.0.3 (which I’ve now upgraded to 2.0.4), and I’m assuming Allow Pings was for an older version. That command set all the pings to no.

3. Then I copied the whole document into MSWord and ran a VB script to change the times. I won’t post that code here to save space, but I’ve got it if anyone wants it and can send via email. That went through and set each consecutive post to a second later. I’m not sure how important it was to have every imported post with a different time, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

4. Then copied the text back to my text document. (Don’t use Word to do the import, as it adds extra code…use Notepad, or for Mac…I use Page Spinner because I like it, but you could use TextEdit or BBEdit, etc.) Saved as a .txt document and I’m done.

5. The really fun and cool part. Go to import in the WP Dashboard, choose Movable Type and import….and there were all my imported posts. BEAUTIFUL!!!

Then I just went through everything to make sure it all worked, and it really did.

The only negative: Using Amber, it did not save any of my links in the pages. So I did have to insert links manually, but would have had to do it anyway since most of my links are internal and were being changed up due to the move to WP.

Hope this post isn’t too complex and can help someone in a position similar to mine. If something doesn’t make sense and I can help in any way, email me.

Thanks to everyone in this thread!!! If it hadn’t been for you, I’d still be trying to do it all by hand and feeling frustrated.

Yay for Kaf and WordPress!

Juli

Kafkaesqui I had to register to compliment you on the awesome post you put together on importing. KUDOS!!!

Yah…. I think this thread needs to have the posts “munged” and get stuffed into the codex posthaste….