import an existing static site in eZ.

Thursday 03 July 2008 2:32:51 pm

I'm looking for a way to import an existing static site in eZ. The site contains hundreds of pages and more than a thousand files. I don't feel doing that manualy :-(
Any suggestions ?

Friday 04 July 2008 6:27:32 am

Hi Piotrek and all

Thanks for your warm welcome in the eZ community, I much appreciate your quick reply.

Before posting, we checked the available features and import extensions and did not find much information for such a big issue (from our current point of view).

The basic principle of keeping content and designed separated would of course be hard to respect with a magic "import all" button. The design can be lost, because that's the reason for redoing the site ! The content cannot.

Files are easy with WebDAV and that's a good starting point.
The ideal import script for the database would be to :
- extract all the text from the static web pages and create correponding nodes with 3 attributes : title (text line), body (xml), creation_date (import date for separating old nodes from new ones).
- analyse the site structure and create a corresponding node tree (easy stuff, isn't it ?)

From that content level import, we would finish by hand by recreating the design.

However, your warning is clear :
"It may be especially difficult to move formatted docs into XMLBlock, especially if you do not have a consistent HTML structure."

Like any similar migration problem, the basic question is : "what is more efficient (time/money) : convert by hand or create the [import all] button ?"

Thanks again for your insight on this topic.