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By T-bone
Published: July 22, 2010
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I've been maintaining TBSWU since 1996 which means I'm approaching the 15 year mark, if you can believe that. I have no way to back this up, but it might mean that this site is one of the longest running Star Wars fan sites still around today. Sure, I don't update as much but there's plenty of unauthorized reference material, interviews, and other little time capsules of information. (I have to say "unauthorized" or else the official cats will accuse me of trying to be legit.) It's sometimes fun to go back and read through it all.
The site's gone through many changes and redesigns over the years and I've always been behind the curtain maintaining things as best as I could. Some years back, I made a small investment in a content management system called Subdreamer. It was a big project because I hadn't been using a database driven system all the years before the purchase. I purchased the system but then realized I had to hand-enter every single thing I had written, plus upload and attach images to articles and so on. Let's just say it wasn't easy and it took forever and a day. I thought it would be worth it because now that everything was in a database, I wouldn't have to do it again.
Well, it turns out I was wrong.
Back when I was making these changes, blog packages like Wordpress were still new and not very developed. Plus, they were not really seen as content management systems but instead seen as blogging software. Wordpress was still limited but over the years has come a long way. I have successfully converted the Starkiller site at Starwarz.com to Wordpress and have also used it on a few other sites I've built on the side. I like it a lot more now and really wish I had just used it in the first place. Plus, it's still free.
So why not just convert the site to Wordpress? Well, it's not that easy it seems. There are no easy scripts out there that will just take your Subdreamer database and convert it to Wordpress, nevermind attaching images and stuff like that. If you take a look through the site, you'll see that (especially in the Cut Scenes area) there are loads of images attached to the articles.
Converting this site to Wordpress would be a HUGE undertaking. It would probably be bigger than the first initial conversion, actually. It would probably be the last of such conversions though. Wordpress is big enough to be around a while and I'm sure if they were to go down, many other systems would have simpler ways to convert the data. But this is thinking too far ahead.
I don't think I can do this alone.
I've made up my mind that I want to convert to Wordpress. However, I'm probably going to be needing a lot of help with data entry at some point. Setting up Wordpress is a quick and painless task. I've already set up a test site and have tried a few skins out. That's the easy, fun part. Taking all this existing data, along with images and what not, and re-entering it all into wordpress is such a huge task that I can barely fathom it.
It makes me wonder if it's worth the effort at all.
So what I'm saying is this. If you think you have time to help and have experience with Wordpress, please let me know. I wish I could hit a magic button and make this all work but it's going to take months to get this thing up and running with all the data intact. If you can help in any way, please let me know.
I'd hate to kill the site or just leave it stagnant for years and years. If it was set up on Wordpress, it would be a lot easier to update and maintain.
Anyone who helps would be welcome to stay on the staff as a reporter or whatever else we can come up with that doesn't involve money. :)
If no one can help, I may have to go it alone...or I may not.
Hope to hear from you soon...wish me luck!
T
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