Forums / Setup & design / Uploading Full Website

"Please Note:

At the specific request of Ibexa we are changing this projects name to "Exponential" or "Exponential (CMS)" effective as of August, 11th 2025.
This project is not associated with the original eZ Publish software or its original developer, eZ Systems or Ibexa".

Uploading Full Website

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Author	Message
James Loving	Friday 16 July 2010 9:54:01 am Is there a way to upload an entire, already-functioning website through Exponential's front end? The server my department's website is on have been upgraded to Exponential, and while the benefits of a CMS are many, right now the most important thing is having the website live. To preempt the obvious suggestion: no, I can't simply FTP into the server; Exponential front end access is all I've got. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Robin Muilwijk	Friday 16 July 2010 12:30:35 pm Hi James, If your question is about migrating an existing website which is currently in either another CMS or plain HTML to Exponential the answer is that you can move the site. But it probably means you have to put all the content and structure into Exponential manually, it is a CMS after all. It does not have an upload feature where you can simply add an entire site in, which then converts/migrates it into a eZ site. If that is what you were asking/expecting of course. Does this answer your question? If not, do let us know and we/I'll try to elaborate more. Regards Robin Board member, eZ Publish Community Project Board - Member of the share.ez.no team - Key values: Openness and Innovation. LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk // Twitter: http://twitter.com/i_robin // Skype: robin.muilwijk
James Loving	Friday 16 July 2010 4:17:51 pm Robin, You had the correct question to start. I'm not looking to convert the entire website to a CMS in one fell swoop; I'd been hoping to keep the website as it stands and make it CMS compliant at my leisure. But, when the upgrade to Exponential happened, the website went down, and because I can't FTP in to the Exponential server (without wrangling some major bureaucracy), I was hoping to use the Exponential front end as a substitute, allowing me to mass upload the files of the website to be online during the conversion. If it affects anything, the website hasn't been on a CMS before; it's just HTML and PHP. Thanks, James
Doug Brethower	Friday 16 July 2010 8:54:46 pm How about the entire site, one page at a time? That seems more do-able. Assuming none of the current site is database driven, that it is all single pages of php and html. No existing objects, classes or template engine to confuse. An extension and class that does the eZ node assignment stuff, but other than that leaves the php and html intact, and delivers it in single pages just like before. Probably will need to plan a title for each page to ease conversion upstream. Seems to me start with a super clean site and create the extension as per http://readtheweb.info/2009/11/29/get-start-a-new-ez-publish-project-part-i/ and part 2. In conjunction with this, the <html> option for the literal tag may bear some exploration. http://webportalmaster.com/index.php/eng/eZ/Advanced/Serving-iPad-Capable-Video-from-eZ-Publish Other than that, it would seem getting the php to work without getting it killed or translated by Exponential is the remaining devil in the details. My 2 cents. This seems to be a pressing problem of the day. You and everyone else looking to move their essentially billboard presence into a CMS. An extension that works for 95 percent of these transitions is in order. Thanks for the starting the discussion. Doug Brethower Apple Certified Technical Consultant, Southwest, MO USA http://share.ez.no/directory/companies/lakedata.net
Gaetano Giunta	Saturday 17 July 2010 4:36:11 am I am not sure the approach described by Doug is a good idea (taking existing html pages and making content objects out of them) - it might be doable at a technical level, but it would amount to the creation of a walking corpse, a horrible zombie. If you allow your users to do that, they will never want to execute phase 2, ie. rearchitect their site in terms of content and not html pages anymore. Ever heard of the 'demo is good, please put it into production' syndrome? They will just ask to have more and more stuff added on top of this horrible hack. Otoh to allow the existing site to be uploaded as 'historical reference' within ezp is doable. But eZ does not provide a nice multi-upload interface to upload your custom stuff. You'd need to set up an eZ extension with a custom module+view, and use that view to actually access all of your legacy code, tucked away in a specific directory. You will most likely only need to add a little url-translation magic Principal Consultant International Business Member of the Community Project Board
Robin Muilwijk	Saturday 17 July 2010 11:31:43 am Hi James, There are already some good suggestions posted which should help you further. Personally I would fix your old site first (you said it went down with the eZ upgrade?). From that point I would simply recreate the structure and content manually in Exponential. This will give you the cleanest content, and also has as pro that you learn how to use Exponential itself (if you did not already). But as I said, that's a personal way of approaching this, I have no idea how many pages your current site counts. I would not chose for an automated solution. Regards Robin Board member, eZ Publish Community Project Board - Member of the share.ez.no team - Key values: Openness and Innovation. LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk // Twitter: http://twitter.com/i_robin // Skype: robin.muilwijk
Olaf Fichtner	Friday 23 July 2010 8:51:23 pm James, I just moved two sites to eZ, though from another CMS. I found it is actually simple if the previous site is still on-line. Just create the document structure you want in eZ, and for the content, just copy the HTML over into the eZ editor. So, just select what you see in your browser on the old site and eZ will happily swallow it. There may be a few things you need to fix later, but if your previous site properly used CSS, then these should only be a few things. The biggest issue is probably images...