Here’s a couple of things that I had to deal with:

International characters in the title. Both CP-1252 and ISO-8859-1. We agreed not to bother trying to fix CP-1252.  We spent a lot of time getting this correct because as it turns out, he had some relative urls and 2.7 will not handle those but 3.0 will. And he liked the idea that 3.0 will rewrite permalinks in the style he wanted. We had some more internationalization problems, again with the title/subject getting to work like wordpress expects.

His Manila gave me a siteStructure that broke my parser and I horsed around a lot trying to get all the posts into the correct category. There were some Manila XML bugs to work around but eventually we got it looking correct and the stuff that didn’t categorize cleanly, gets WordPress tags so they can be found. A nice feature, actually.

That’s what happens in a conversion from Manila to Wordpress. It’s why I charge, I know where the demons lurk.

Issue #1. It might not be clear in the documentation that RubyGems has to be installed. It’s not the easiest thing to install because you have to google the correct set of instructions for your particular OS & version. I’m not picking on OS X. It was a minor challenge for me to get Gems installed in Ubuntu Linux. Too many ways to do it, some of them wrong. It’s a challenge.

Issue #2. Fixurl.tcl will probably croak with an error message like (but not identical)

.....
can't read "msgmap(13)": no such element in array
    while executing
"set newnum $msgmap($msgnum)"
    ("while" body line 6)
    invoked from within
"while {[gets $sf line]>0} {
        set msgnum [lindex $line 0]
        set path [lindex $line 2]
        #puts stderr "$msgnum $path"
        if {$path != "stories"} {
                ..."
    (file "./fixurl.tcl" line 245)

I’ve seen this problem. The cure is to edit the ’structure’ file and remove the line with “nnn {About} about” where nnn is a different number for everyone. Then rerun fixurl.tcl.
—

You might ask ‘why don’t you fix the code and documentation’ instead of posting a blog entry? Do you want the long version or the short version?

Short Version:
It’s easier to delete that ‘about’ line in the structures file than to fix the scripts and documentation.

Long Version:
I don’t run the 2.7 scripts because I have 3.0 versions and you don’t. Actually, it’s real a bitch to test modifications to the 2.7 scripts without a live working Manila site to test against. There are fewer and fewer Manila sites wanting conversion. Only a fewer of the few will grant me access to test. That’s just how it is, the pool is drying up. It’s not worth the effort to make a 2.7.1. A business decision.

I have a design or scheme or architecture in mind. It’s early and it will change as needed by user feedback and actual practice. This  single page PDF  will give you the basic idea  if you don’t get all picky about the detail, or the presentation.

MvManila 2.7 documentation is now the current “Online Doc’s”. The older downloads have the older documentation inside should you need it.

MvManila 2.7 is probably last public release of MvManila unless there’s feedback. There are no plans to release Version 3.0 – It’s almost a complete rewrite, much more powerful and even more confusing for the average person.