Importing from xml
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I have a very old site [www.MissingPortraits.info] that I want to port to WordPress. In a very helpful ‘Getting Started: Website Building 101’ WordPress seminar today it was suggested I export it to .xml rather than cut and paste page by page. The very old app the site was designed in [Freeway Pro 7] has no .xml or html export feature [except to upload it in the first place], so is there any way to convert an existing site to .xml? I can see there are converters for individual pages, but I assume that would lose all inks.
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Hi there,
It seems that development for Freeway stopped back in 2016, and I also do not see it available on the list of platforms here.
The good news is that I could count 18 pages of content on your website, if I am not mistaken. And the process of moving them manually on a new WordPress.com website should be a breeze.
How comfortable are you with blocks at the moment?
Here is a related guide on them, in any case:
https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/I would have a look at the ~2 minute video up-top for starters, since there is a wide variety of them -to cater for the many needs of building with content.
I hope that helps, otherwise let us know :)
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Thanks so much for that, my heart lifted at the word breeze …
As this will be my first WordPress site I’m not familiar with blocks [apart from the quick demo in the 101 seminar] but I suspect they are not very different to frames in PageMaker/Quark, etc, but with styles attached.
Freeway stopped an age ago, but my site is much older. It is only 32-bit which is stopping me from upgrading MacOS in case I just might need to use it once more. It has a completely rewritten replacement but it is not backwards compatible and I don’t want to get tied back in to something so proprietory. Of course WordPress is also proprietory but if it ever ceased there would inevitably be a huge support community.
In the 101 seminar I asked about copying and pasting a site into WordPress, I think basically what you are suggesting, and was told that importing .xml was a better option. As far as I can see there are plenty of websites that convert .html to .xml on a page-by-page basis, so I assume I could then import them to WordPress on a page-by-page basis and lose the internal links.
I guess the question then is which is easier: messing with Blocks while not fully understanding them or extracting the .html by going to Developer mode in Chrome, copying the pages, converting to.xml and then importing to WordPress via its filter.
Thank you again, any further advice welcome! CC -
Hi there,
Of course WordPress is also proprietory but if it ever ceased there would inevitably be a huge support community.
WordPress is not proprietary. It’s open source, which is the exact opposite of proprietary :)
The WordPress software is not controlled by any company, but belongs entirely to the WordPress.org community who makes it. Additionally, you have complete access to the source code, can modify it in any way you want, and can even redistribute your modified version for other people to use should you want to.
We at WordPress.com is just one of many hosting providers for that software.
The WordPress software (including here on WordPress.com – we’re a managed host, so we don’t give you access to the source code of the specific, modified version we use here, but any content you create here is fully compatible with the open source version of the software) also comes with an export feature built in, so can always export your content from any WordPress site, no matter where it’s hosted, as a .xml file which you can then import to another WordPress site at another host, or even to a completely different platform, provided that platform supports .xml imports.
In the 101 seminar I asked about copying and pasting a site into WordPress, I think basically what you are suggesting, and was told that importing .xml was a better option
I don’t think the person who answered you there understood that you’re referring to an old, hard-coded site without an export option. For sites like that, copy-pasting really is the only viable option. We even have a guide explaining the steps you’ll need to follow here:
https://transferto.wordpress.com/drag-and-drophtml-site-builders/
You can try a XML converter, but personally I’d be surprised if that works – to import a file here it not only has to be in the .xml format, but the data in the file needs to be structured in a very specific way. If the data is not structured correctly, our importer would not be able to parse it, and the import will fail.
Also looking at your site’s source code, the content on every page appears to actually be content from yet another site, http://www.lankidden.com/missingportraits/, that’s being embedded on http://missingportraits.info/ via an
iframe, which would further complicate any attempt at converting the HTML into XML.Going the manual route will ultimately be both simpler and faster.
I guess the question then is which is easier: messing with Blocks while not fully understanding them
The block editor is designed so you don’t actually need to think about the blocks unless you need them. So just go to your site, open a page, select the content, and copy. Then open the editor on your WordPress.com site, and paste. The editor should automatically select the correct blocks based on how your content is formatted.
The only immediate exception is images – for those you’ll want to download the image files from your site onto your computer’s hard drive. Then drag-and-drop the image file from the hard drive into the WordPress.com editor. This will automatically select an Image block and upload the file to the media library.
Let us know if you have any more questions about this.
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Thank you. My misunderstanding, I thought the core was proprietary, so even better then.
You are right about the redirect, I have my own domain and as a temporary measure a friend with some spare space [lankidden.com] hosted it for me and then I had to give up on it so it just sat there unchanged since 2013. I’ll certainly take your word for it and abandon the .xml advice.
It is going to take me a lot of time to understand WordPress, I wish my site was suitable for a blog which would be a lot easier to do.
I have all the original images, both at high res and optimised for web. As for the text I can copy it from Freeway, from the site or in .html via Chrome Developer mode, whichever is best.
It would be great if someone could suggest a template suitable for the content of http://www.MissingPortraits.info which I can then play with. My priority is to get the site up so I can add to it, and with a mobile-friendly design as its origins pre-date mobile!
Of course if there is somebody who does this sort of thing professionally and can be bothered with 18 pages it would be even better.
Thanks again, CC -
You can see our themes list here:
If you scroll down and click “Show all themes”, you’ll be able to narrow down the selection of themes (by Feature, Layout, Columns, Subject, Style, Free, and Paid) and you can find one that suits your needs best.
I hope that helps!
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