Job: Converting Existing Website

I'm interested in finding out what it would take in terms of time and money to get assistance in converting this website: deltabravo.net (a site for divorced or separated parents)

We're looking at converting the majority of the site to e107. The only part we'd really like to keep or integrate is the SMF forum. The rest of it can all go into e107 (we hope!)

I and another one of the site owners both know PHP fairly well so we could help with any oddball parts, including importing the existing pages or other parts into e107.

So, what do you think? How long might it take, and what might some e107 wizard want to do the conversion? We're not rich but we can afford to pay some reasonable cost.

(My partner is trying to convince me to use eZ Publish, but I really like e107 better. Please help me convince him!)

If you have any questions about the site, please feel free to ask.

Your site is a great candidate for e107 but I fear there is no simple method of doing this with the variety of content you have.

There's a work-around for all of it like the articles, faqs, etc. but it's going to take either some very creative PHP/MySQL scripts or a lot of recreating.

A long time ago there was a way to sort of integrate SMF into e107 but it's been so long and so many changes have come I doubt that method is still valid. Your forums are simple enough that I believe they could be pulled into the e107 forum system without too much effort.

I can offer help on how to replace functions you have on your site now with e107 equivalents but I fear it's still going to take some creative coding and manual massaging.

I have a PHP guru as a partner but you say you already know PHP.

Maybe someone else here can think of a more automated way to convert the site.

1) What we really need is the basic structure set up- the categories and overall framework. We've got a test install in place on another domain, but honestly we can't seem to figure out even some of the simplest things.

2) I can write any conversion scripts needed (I do a lot of that kind of thing), or my partner and I can manually cut and paste everything, page by page. We'd just do it a bit at a time until it was all done. We're fine with recreating the site that way and we're fine with writing any custom stuff to help glue it all together or to provide the necessary functionality.

As for the forum, we'd be fine with leaving it as-is, without any integration.

The main areas are the Articles Index and the FAQs. We can write some custom front ends to a lot of the other stuff that would end up in e107 pages. For example, the Professionals Directory, Resources By State, etc . If e107 allows us to include PHP in its pages, then we can do it.

A lot of the other stand-alone applications on the site would mostly stay as is, with e107 pages linked in to them (e.g. the Hospitality Exchange, etc). We'd copy the look and feel of the theme to these parts as best we could, but that's not a critical thing.

Our main problem is just getting the basic site set up so we can build on it.

Later today I'll take another look at your existing site and put a bit more thought into the best way to move specific areas to e107.



I think much manual recreation can be avoided by some creative field mapping and importing. Again, as I look deeper I'll know more.



Why? the e107 forum is more than capable of handling what I've seen of your forum area. Sure, you could pass login info from e107 to SMF but now you're creating a security hole. Just my opinion.

For the FAQ's get a copy of Father Bary's FAQ plugin [-link-] and look at the table structure for faq and faq_info, you can then create a mysql import script

Content Manager Plugin may be to complex so you could look at e107 core custom pages - database table is 'page' for those

The existing html pages could be turned into 'stand alone custom pages' - details in the wiki and would then appear in theme and use the css from the theme

It would be a case of copying the content over individually

Or

Use the 'wrap' plugin to wrap the existing pages in the theme layout

Thank you, I'll look at the FAQ plugin.

One other question I've been looking for an answer to but may have missed is whether or not I can include arbitrary PHP code in the various pages I create. Can I do this?

You could until v0.7.26 via a bbcode [php] but it was a security risk so the function was removed

It's best to use 'stand alone custom pages'

[quote]
You could until v0.7.26 via a bbcode [php] but it was a security risk so the function was removed[/quote1330612299]

Dang, that would have solved a multitude of problems.

If directly including PHP code isn't an option, is it possible to include or pull in an external page that would have the PHP code in it, and have the output of that code appear within the page?

Yes, with the stand alone pages you can have anything you like

You could add the [php] bbcode back in from an earlier version, but you are taking a risk as those pages made from within the site admin area get stored in the database, stand alone pages or 'wrapped' ones don't

For an exaple of what 'wrap' can do see:http://c4owners.org/plugins/external/external.php?17

You can call other sites within it, not just your existing pages

After a fair bit of experimentation, I think we're going to have to try another route. e107 is very nice, extremely full-featured, and can probably do everything what we want, but getting there looks like it's going to be an uphill climb for us.

At this point we're going to work this from the other end, so to speak. One of the main things we wanted to keep was the SMF Forum, so we're going to use an add-on for SMF called "TinyPortal".

It's a CMS package that does ~99% of what we need, and it allows for the easy creation of ad hoc pages with PHP/HTML, etc. As an SMF add-on it integrates with the forum 100% and it also inherits all of the existing permissions, user groups, etc that the forum uses. It can also make use of the existing mod/plugin packages for SMF (many of which we're already using).

In short, I appreciate the assistance you all provided. Thanks again for all your help!

Cheers

Mike