Battleangel | Personal

Moving content from Nucleus to Wordpress presented a number of problems. Some due to my own recklessness and lack of foresight, many due to the structural differences between the two content managers and some because of limitations or quirks in Wordpress (yes, really). I’m not exactly new to Wordpress, but moving such a diverse content base as the one at Battleangel nevertheless presented a number of difficulties.

Here are some of the issues that came up:

• wptexturize Wordpress has a built-in function called wptexturize which adds what Nucleus users would call “fancy text”, i.e. curly quotes and the like. Now, the problem is that wptexturize is part of the core and can’t be shut down or controlled via options. There are plugins that claim to nullify wptexturize but they all failed to do their thing for me on WP 2.1 alpha3. Normally, having wptexturize would be a good thing. But when a number of special conditions are met, the function turns into a real nightmare. Especially when the function seems broken as it has been for some time, failing to skip code and pre tags as it is supposed to. Applying the patch helped and I could eventually install a GeSHi plugin to do syntax highlighting just as I had in Nucleus.
• Syntax Highlighting And on the topic of syntax highlighters, it wasn’t easy finding a plugin that actually worked on more complicated examples. Especially php that had html tags embedded. I ended up with iG:Syntax Hiliter which unfortunately need special code tags around the text. As opposed to normal GeSHi adaptations which usually settle for a pre php or pre lang=php or somesuch semi-standard solution. iG:Syntax Hiliter will require manually finding and editing old posts. Luckily there aren’t that many that use syntax highlighting.
• Post Preview Another quirk turned out to be the ever expanding post / page edit screen in Wordpress. Especially that preview iframe which insists on loading your entire site every time. In the past I even went as far as edit that piece of junk out of the core files. Thankfully, now we have a plugin (Clutter-Free) which gives you a choice of how the edit page and the Wordpress interface should be rendered.
• Search and Replace A different kind of annoyance is that staggering number of linebreaks that were left hard coded in the content. Thanks to Nucleus and the import script no doubt. Incidentally, the br tags also interfered with the syntax highlighting as they were printed as well. This nuisance called for another favorite plugin, namely Search and Replace which acts as a front end for SQL replace. Using this plugin and phpMyAdmin, I should be able to find and fix missing images and other nuisances. If you need regular expression search and replace plus a nice front end (with preview capabilities!) there is always the Search Regex Plugin.

More generally speaking, I also implemented sitemap.xml.gz for both Yahoo and Google across the three sites. And fixed up some odds and ends with Technorati. I’m not big on those services but I figure that since I don’t subscribe to the chummy link-a-thon that usually goes on between people on the www, I should at least be properly indexed.

Now I’m working on a portal site [tentative domain and design] and possibly some sort of unified layout, or a unified navigation banner or somesuch that will span Silent Nation, Battleangel and The Personal Journal. Maybe a top bar and drop down menus with rss feeds from all three sites, or a simpler solution most likely. Something that will bring the sites more closely together nevertheless.