Migrating from WP to TXP?

jakob · 2015-05-26 20:54:51

A while back I inherited the task of looking after a couple of Wordpress installations set up by someone else and am in two minds about it. On the one hand the admin side has many aspects that are friendlier to the normal user – specifically the edit areas and image handling which are more wysiwyg in their approach than txp’s – and I can see that it can be pretty powerful. The update mechanisms work fairly smoothly too (with exceptions). On the other hand, it seems – to me at least – to be incredibly fragmented and bloated. Making even small changes requires navigating and hooking up countless small pieces, and it’s not immediately apparent where to find them. There are a myriad of options for rejigging one’s site, switching post formats, and lots of different fields for each post, very few of which the site users are actually make use of. I guess this isn’t entirely down to WP, but also both a factor of how the site was set up and the puzzle pieces of plugins by different authors (each with their own menus) as well as all-singing, all-dancing themes that aim to offer something for everyone and thus provide way more than any single user will need.

Most recently, one site has been the target of regular login attempts (at 20 minute intervals all day all week all month from new IPs), causing the security system to regularly lock out the legitimate site users. I have to regularly whitelist the owner’s ip so that he can actually get into his own site. Over the bank holiday weekend it was hacked, this time through an exploit in one of the theme’s sliders (I think). I got it restored from a backup. The admin area tells me the theme needs updating, but the theme seller has changed hands and it needs repaying for (now with annual service contract) to update it to make it secure. There’s a free version of the theme, with the same gaping wide security vulnerability being happily offered by the theme seller.

I’m toying with the idea of transferring the site over to txp. Currently it has some 90 posts and weighs 500MB!! The site layout is easy enough to replicate, and most of the rest of the theme’s facilities aren’t being used. The main “problems” to solve are:

How can I migrate blog posts easily over to a format that can be imported into txp so I don’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time on content entry?
The same for the images?
What, in your opinion, is the most wysiwyg-friendly body field editor for txp? I usually just use textile, occasionally with rah_textile_bar, so have never really tried out the others.
Automatic posting to Facebook (see other thread).

I seem to recall that txp’s wordpress importer is no longer up to date? Is that true, or do I just need to export in a particular format? Any tips of ideas?

bici · 2015-05-26 22:42:06

this post talks about the issue of migrating from WP to TxP
a few years back i migrated someone from WP toTxP. They were using an outdated theme and no easy way to add new sections etc. It was a restaurant site and it had about 20 articles and a small blog. I ended up doing it all manually.

jakob · 2015-05-27 08:10:51

this post talks about the issue of migrating from WP to TxP

Thanks. I saw that recent post too, but it about migrating from TXP to WP, i.e. in the other direction.

it had about 20 articles and a small blog. I ended up doing it all manually

As it’s hard to persuade a client to part with money for a migration to another system without including some other associated benefits, I’d like to minimise the task of me reentering past data. 20 articles isn’t so bad but I’d rather not do the copy-paste-adjust-save routine 90 times over, and the same again for the images if I don’t have to. It doesn’t have to be fully automatic – I’m fine with a bit of search and replacing.

At the same time, I need to convince them that they’re not taking a step back when the UI for entering content is not as WYSIWG as WP. I think it will be simpler and more straightforward for them in the long run, but I’d like to smooth the transition for them as much as possible.

Dragondz · 2015-05-27 08:11:22

Hi

maybe jmd_csv can help you import data, export wp post to csv and then modify the header file with excel or libroffice to match txp db and import them using the plugin

Cheers

uli · 2015-05-27 13:17:49

jakob wrote #291096:

What, in your opinion, is the most wysiwyg-friendly body field editor for txp?

I hoped someone more WYSIWYG-experienced than me would write about this point, my own experience is more from admining these than from using. Well. From my sandbox (and only sandbox) experiences I’d choose hak_tinyMCE as the most versatile one, and if inserting TXP-administrated images is a must, you don’t have another choice, no other editor has that feature. The kuo-version (tinyMCE v4) has the more modern look, though, if your client is sensitive there. hak_tinyMCE’s Word 95 look is a little odious. IIRC you can also skin hak’s tinyMCE (which uses tinyMCE v3), but I’ve never done it. The hak_tinyMCE versatility, though, needs more of your attention to customize the button overload, and that brings reading their twisted API docs and manually editing array parameters.

The second place in my tests went to CKeditor, also versatile, modern looking, tidy UI, nice table creation, though IIRC the tinyMCEs let you edit more there if you edit their params, or hack them in, respectively (kuo’s). Third by a hair was kuo_tinyMCE. Didn’t find a way, though, to hack any of these to output TXP tags, like I could do with rah_textilebar, not even custom-class spans. Hence you’d have to force some tag like del to look like something different if need be. Yukk!

kuopassa has released quite a range of other implementations of existing WYSIWYG editors. I tested them shortly but in the end didn’t find a real advantage over the preferred tinyMCE(s) and CKeditor. The latter one and some of the other kuos tend to overwrite existing Textile code, in case you want to continue your Textile tradition.

kuo’s plugins, BTW, are quickly installed (one-file installation, except for CLeditor) as they depend on libraries from JS CDNs, so no real hurdle for testing. But the dependency will cause them to break if the CDN has downtimes or is discontinued. Otherwise the plugins need editing in case you prefer an installation on your client’s server.

Some small edits.

Last edited by uli (2015-05-27 13:27:28)

colak · 2015-05-27 15:12:55

I find wysiwyg editors problematic. I recently was given access to the admin side of an academic wp site where I found a lot of errors to the html regardless of the fact that the chief editor was a seasoned new media professor. With textile, if you write anything wrong, it appears on the front end and you go back to correct it, the problem with wysiwyg is that you can add wrong html tag combinations and although it might appear OK, many times it is invalid html.

joebaich · 2015-05-27 15:46:37

Were it me, CKEditor would be the one. I noted that the Processwire folks ditched tinyMCE as their ‘out of the box editor’ in favour of it. They concluded that CKEditor is more configurable, it can sanitize input, and its image handling is better.

If you could persuade your client to part with USD 99 and could get it integrated it with TXP, Redaktor might be even better.

bici · 2015-05-27 15:51:57

joebaich wrote #291120:

If you could persuade your client to part with USD 99 and could get it integrated it with TXP, Redaktor might be even better.

has anyone successfully gotten Redaktor integrated with TXP?

jpdupont · 2015-05-27 16:05:32

Have you seen the 4.5 beta of CKEditor ?

tye · 2015-05-28 06:17:16

Going back to the original question – you could remove the slider from the theme (I know – alot of function removing) and replace with a better slider…

I also add quite a few security plugins to every wordpress installation… let me know if you want a list – if you keep WP

jakob · 2015-05-28 10:28:48

Thanks for your interesting and informative replies.

jmd_csv

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve used that before, and you can also import directly to phpMyAdmin from a table if you have the correct table format. I’m confident I can get data across but something that hooks up images and internal links properly would be great.

From my experiences I’d choose hak_tinyMCE as the most versatile one, and if inserting TXP-administrated images is a must …

Thanks for the tips, and especially your run-down of what already exists Uli. Certainly image handling would be great if it is possible. I’d definitely want to dumb it down to not offer too many options.

I find wysiwyg editors problematic

I like textile too, just wonder whether a user who is now used to word-like formatting options that show on screen will balk at the “nakedness” of textile. There are numerous markdown formatters out there that semi-format the markup, italicising, emboldening, showing indentations etc. I think that’s quite a nice half-way house, I find. Siteleaf have a version of that for images where the image in markdown markup is shown on hover (see http://www.siteleaf.com/assets/markdown-in-siteleaf-hover-image.jpg). I wonder if that’s doable here too.

If you could persuade your client to part with USD 99 and could get it integrated it with TXP, Redaktor might be even better

That looks great but that’s a steep price. I guess the even more expensive professional option might pay off if you spread the cost over multiple homepages. Is is feasible to use with txp?

you could remove the slider from the theme and replace

Yes, that is an option, but the changelog of the theme also shows that other security vulnerabilities have been patched in contact forms etc.

I also add quite a few security plugins

There are already several security plugins installed. One of them does block the false login attempts, blacklists IPs, and adds htaccess deny blocks, but login attempts continue from ever changing IP numbers at regular intervals, so the actual user has to be lucky to log in when his user is not currently locked out. I’ve since created a second non-public login so that he can use that to login, then whitelist his current IP, then logout and relogin to do his actual work… If you know of other more effective security plugins, do say…

Algaris · 2015-05-29 09:02:11

I’m using WordFence for our WordPress website at work.

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#1 2015-05-26 20:54:51