Joomla! Discussion Forums

Hello! I run a law website and would like to convert them to a CMS. Of all the ones I've tinkered with, Joomla comes on top. However, I've come upon a really big snag and thats importing my old HTML pages to Joomla's content pages.

Of course, there's always cutting and pasting these pages using the "new content" function but believe me, this will take ages and ages to accomplish. If you're familiar with laws, supreme court cases and other legal documents you'll know that they're both verbose and numerous. To give you an idea, I'm working with over 50,000 individual HTML pages that have been encoded over the past four years. They also have numerous H1 to H5 tags that are used to number and classify the different sections of laws and cases. This covers laws and cases promulgated since 1901 to 2004. If you want to see the site its at www.lawphil.net.

It seems that I might be stuck doing the whole copy-paste thing but 50K pages is, without a doubt, quite a herculean task. I've tried this component, site_import which doesn't really work for me. I can't figure out how it works and based on the description, it would probably rip my pages apart as it uses the H1 and H2 tags for sections and categories, respectively.

I've seen the posts on something similar to what I'm doing but so far I haven't seen anyone close to having the volume of pages I have. I was wondering (hoping actually) that someone might be able to help me. If it means anything, I've got consistent formatting among all the pages and mostly use just the H1 to H5, P, and BR tags and leave all the text formatting to a single CSS file. Please, please help me.

Thanks in advanced! I hope you can help me 

If the formatting is indeed constant then you should be able to write a script that will import them into the mysql database. Not my area of expertise I'm afraid but it should definitely be possible

Brian

I'm in the same wagon as you.  Lots of pages, frames and old html stuff.  The only problem i have faced is that Joomla uses tables, lots of them, and that's unacceptable for current standards.  Other than that, and as far as know Joomla is one of the best options available.  Regarding the importing task I was thinking in paying someone to do the copy/paste job.  If only I could get rid of those stupid tables...

I wish someone had taught me "good" webdesign a few years ago. I've spent about two weeks cleaning up the HTML on my PC and trying to make them better organized for when I start inserting all the data. So far I've separated my other files that contains tables in them so I'll deal with them some other time when I've learned enough about Joomla. As it is, I'm still hoping someone knows of a script that can automate importing these things. Oh well. Thanks a lot for the replies so far. I really appreciate it.

This thread may help you: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,24921.0.html.



A project exists to facilitate site import : http://developer.joomla.org/sf/projects/site_import. Never used it myself, though.

Will bookmark this thread for future reference.


It seems that there is no progress on this project though.