"Migrating to a new platform. What to do?" Topic

DeepFriedHappyMice.com was built using NetObjects Fusion. Now defunct, and my aging PC on which it was loaded is on its last legs. It won't run on new versions of windows and I don't have an install CD.

So I need to move to a new authoring program/platform.

But how do I migrate the old pages? There are over 600 to be moved….

Suggestions?

I had a similar dilemma when my webhost for Fanaticus quit supporting Frontpage. Most web sites run by non professionals these days are built on template-based content management platforms like Joomla or Wordpress. Netobjects has a unique way of coding HTML that doesn't translate well. Adobe Dreamweaver is often recommended as the best replacement if you aren't going the CMS route. But I'm not sure it is easy to translate Netobjects files, or how well they would look in Adobe templates. Most people seem to recommend starting from scratch (taking all your content back to plain text and then recreating the pages with the new tool). Adobe is also a tool more for the professional webdeveloper and will take some time to learn how to use it proficiently. Whether it's worth the time and money is a hard call. It wasn't for me and Fanaticus.

Buy a new PC, and hire a 15 year old nephew to fix it. Try not to be upset by his condescending arrogance and eyebrow lift.

You can use a program to suck down all the pages as HTML, then rebuilt the broken links and layout.
If you can get into the database pull out all the data as text and images. Rebuild in a new engine.
Your existing engine may have an export function; perhaps as XML, a more modern engine such as WordPress might be able to import it.

Expect a lot of links to be broken. It is a workable job.

I gave up running my own website years ago and just switched to blogger. As all I ever did was publish content in various forms, it was far easier to do it that way.

Ive overseen large corporate website migration projects, and a lot of the time it is far easier to employ an army of contractors to rekey the content than attempt to port it, as it usually needs a major clearout and redesign anyway. As gbowen says, if you can get to the core text you can at least cut and paste it into the templates on the new system.

I asked my son-in-law who writes programs, just out of curiosity and because I have known you, so to speak, for a long time on TMP. He said he would have a lot of questions and maybe could use a basic text editor. There are places to go on the web to get it done and 2 are free. That probably is little to no help for you, but I thought I would give you his 2Cents. Good Luck!

Check waybackmachine to see if your existing pages have been crawled and saved for posterity. If not then, perhaps, get them crawled. At least then they'll have been saved for posterity.

All my pages are still online and I have access to the database.

I think I'll just bite the bullet and just manually copy/paste to a new CMS system.