I need blog and gallery recommendations

[cydewaze]

I have a personal website that has been around for around 12 years, and has undergone several design iterations. The current design is one I really like a lot, partially because it's simple and straightforward and uses background images that I created myself from pics I took up at the cottage.

The current version of my site has a blog and a photo gallery. For the gallery, I use Gallery2 software, which was installable via CP. I was able to get the gallery incorporated with my design, but it's not perfect. "Friendly URLs" don't work, and support from the Gallery website is hit or miss. Many of the posts I've made on the support forum have gone unanswered, and many of the ones that were answered were done so in a very vague manner. Now they're up to Gallery3 now I think, and I've had horrible luck getting that to work within my design, so I stuck with 2.

As for the blog, it's actually an Invision Power Board install on another site hosted on the same machine. I basically coded some PHP so that when I make a post on the IPB board blog, I can choose a category that makes it show up as a post on my website.

This setup has had MANY problems.

First off, people would have to register on the IPB forum to be able to post replies to my blog entries, which isn't going to happen, so I have a reply-free blog. As such, my motivation to post is pretty low, because it makes it seem like I'm the only one looking at the site (and maybe I am). The other problem is that if someone wants to post a comment on one of my pics, they need to create a separate account in my gallery.

What I would like to do it find a blog package that also has a gallery feature; one that allows me to upload multiple photos in one shot, and one that would allow visitors to comment on both pics and posts. I also want something that fits into my current template (i.e. my header and footer), and I'm not sure if WordPress does that. I know WP has a gallery or three as an add-on, but beyond that I have little to no WP experience.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[WebCrawler]

Yes, I can see the complexity involves in managing a site where you use Gallery2 for Gallery, IPB for Forum and WordPress for Blog and I don think it has centralized Login access (control panel) to Manage. Yes, all this can be done nicely using latest WordPress 3.4.1. Using one Login, using one Theme, using one design you can use NextGen Gallery, Default Blog Posts, BBPress Forum and lot many functionality with easy.

The only concern is migrating your old data to new setup. Its natural you don't want to loose valuable data and parallely you also do not want to loose you Search Engine listings of existing pages, but this too can be take care nicely using WordPress 301 Redirection plugin and Migration tools.

[cydewaze]

Thanks for the reply. I had been searching some myself on this, and found the following:

Integrating WordPress with Your Website (make Wordpress work within my existing template)
and...
Importing from an RSS feed (gets my blog posts from IPB to WP)

The only problem is that apparently the IPB RSS feature truncates my blog posts, so there's no good way to import them. It looks like I'd have to do them one at a time (and I have 204 of them), which means figuring out a way to change the post date (maybe that's easy) so it doesn't look like I made all the posts in one day.

If I figure that out, the next challenge will be importing my Gallery2 albums to whatever WP album I use, and I have over 7000 pics in my gallery (though I could pare that down quite a bit).

Thanks again for the reply. Looks like I need to do some more thinking.

[WebCrawler]

Thanks again for the reply. Looks like I need to do some more thinking.

Yes, you have to think and need to write a error free migration script for both gallery and forum posts

[awasson]

I'm not a WP pro by any stretch so bear with me but there must be a method you can use to import your blogs other than by RSS. That does suck that the feed truncates your posts.

I've imported websites into Drupal using a module called Feeds. I wonder if WP has something similar. It can take RSS but it also takes Atom feeds, OPML files or CSV files. I've used CSV as my choice. It takes a little setup and you manually create the CSV file in Open Office or Excel so there is some tedious labour but you have all the control over the import and if you use Firebug to help grab the content it makes it a lot easier. Not as simple giving it a feed to consume but doable and relatively quick once you get going.

[cydewaze]

Yes, you have to think and need to write a error free migration script for both gallery and forum posts

If this was ColdFusion, no problem. In PHP, not gonna happen.

I'm not a WP pro by any stretch so bear with me but there must be a method you can use to import your blogs other than by RSS. That does suck that the feed truncates your posts.

I've imported websites into Drupal using a module called Feeds. I wonder if WP has something similar. It can take RSS but it also takes Atom feeds, OPML files or CSV files. I've used CSV as my choice.

I wonder if I could go straight into phpMyAdmin and export the blog table as a CSV file straight from the database. Then the cleanup might not be so bad. Hmmmm...

[awasson]

I wonder if I could go straight into phpMyAdmin and export the blog table as a CSV file straight from the database. Then the cleanup might not be so bad. Hmmmm...

Good call... That is certainly a quick way to get all the content ordered the way it needs to be. Export as CSV and then fine tune in Excel

[WebCrawler]

I wonder if I could go straight into phpMyAdmin and export the blog table as a CSV file straight from the database. Then the cleanup might not be so bad. Hmmmm...

1. It entirely depend on number of posts you have in IPB and Gallery. Small posts easy, many post, tough.
2. Tables are interlinked and joined with Posts + User Tables + Metas. You can not manipulate single table in CSV and upload it. Not going to work.

[awasson]

1. It entirely depend on number of posts you have in IPB and Gallery. Small posts easy, many post, tough.
2. Tables are interlinked and joined with Posts + User Tables + Metas. You can not manipulate single table in CSV and upload it. Not going to work.

I think cydewaze is just considering blog posts at the moment of which there are 204. That's not much... It's like a sampling of data compared with some of the data dumps I've seen. I wouldn't even give it a second thought. Export as CSV, open in Excel and see what you have to work with.

The gallery will be another story but you should be able to either do a dump to CSV or write a PHP script with a query to pull the data exactly exactly as you want/need it for your import and format it as CSV within the PHP script.

[WebCrawler]

The gallery will be another story but you should be able to either do a dump to CSV or write a PHP script with a query to pull the data exactly exactly as you want/need it for your import and format it as CSV within the PHP script.

I have worked with both Gallery2 and IPB and the Table structure of both are very different. I migrated huge database from IPB to Xoops system in batches. IPB Table is one of the most complex structure I have found. There is only one easiest way:

1. To migrate IPB to WP using http://ipbwi.com/products/ (IPBWI for WordPress)
2. To Migrate Gallery2 to WordPress, you can use a Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gallery2-importer/

Hope this help

[cydewaze]

2. Tables are interlinked and joined with Posts + User Tables + Metas. You can not manipulate single table in CSV and upload it. Not going to work.

Actually, I just did it (unless you meant that the uploading to WP is not going to work)

SELECT * FROM ibf_blog_entries WHERE entry_author_id = 1

Then sorted by entry date, select all, and export to CSV. Took around 3 minutes.

The gallery will likely not be so easy.

[awasson]

Actually, I just did it (unless you meant that the uploading to WP is not going to work)

SELECT * FROM ibf_blog_entries WHERE entry_author_id = 1

Then sorted by entry date, select all, and export to CSV. Took around 3 minutes.

The gallery will likely not be so easy.

Nice! Yeah, that's a nice small dataset to work with, with only ~200 postings. Also good to hear there are products that WebCrawler referenced for dealing with the Gallery mess. I've only played around with gallery a few times and it seems that it is too complex for any of the needs my clients have had. I always ended up creating my galleries using Drupal + Views. I'm sure there is a similar workflow that will work with WP.

Glad to hear your making quick work of the blog posts

[cydewaze]

Actually, I can pare those blog posts down significantly as it turns out. Not all of the blog posts were set to show on my website blog. Some of them only showed on the forum blog, and would make no sense as standalone posts on my website blog. Once I pare down the categories that don't belong, I'll only have around 140 posts to deal with.

I agree about Gallery. I once tried to write a snippet to show a "featured pic" in the sidebar on the front page of my website. After looking at the database and seeing what a disaster it was, I didn't even try. In fact I couldn't even find a table that had a list of pics, pic IDs or anything. It was an absolute mess.

But I'll definitely be checking out that importer that WebCrawler linked to. Good stuff!

[cydewaze]

Well this is going rather slowly.

I decided to try importing the IPB csv file into WP after rearranging the columns to match what WP expects, but it's not that easy. The date format is different (timestamp vs date) and the WP db has a URL column for each post.

This is going to be VERY time-consuming.