CUNY Academic Commons

An update...

I was testing the weebly-CAC import with the weebly site below

https://globalizationlehman.weebly.com/

And was planning to upload the site here

https://weeblyimport.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

The HTML Archive Zip I was able to get for this site is attached

I will keep poking around in the back end of weebly to see if I can get a WXR file. When I try to use the Weeblytowp tool I get an error message that the URL does not contain a blog (screenshot attached).

Thanks, Laurie!

After doing some reading, it looks to me like the weeblytowp.com tool works only on blog posts because it uses Weebly's RSS feed as a source, and the RSS feed only contains blog content. This makes the tool a non-starter for our purposes.

I've had a look at the HTML export. An automated plugin for importing HTML is not only insecure, but it's going to produce very bad results with an archive like this one, since the majority of the HTML markup in each file is related to navigation and other elements that aren't relevant when importing to WordPress. So we would need a custom tool. I could build such a tool, but I should first caution that the results are not likely to be pretty:
a. Most of the CSS-based styling included on the Weebly site will not be included on import. WordPress uses a centralized theming system to dictate the styles for a site, so the team will have to more or less start from scratch.
b. The left-hand navigation will not be retained, and will need to be rebuilt somehow (probably using the WP Menu system).
c. Individual page headers, like the banner at the top of https://globalizationlehman.weebly.com/beauty-standards.html, can be imported, but they're likely to be redundant with the page titles that are already built into WordPress themes. This might require manual cleanup on each post later on. (I can also skip these headers if that's what's best.)
d. Some formatting of page content is not likely to come through the import. For example, the "column" layout on https://globalizationlehman.weebly.com/beauty-standards.html ("The United States..." and the Big Bill Broonzy video appear on the left, the Laurie Cooper photograph on the right) uses some Weebly-specific styling that can't easily be imported. Another example on the same page is the different font sizes in the Willie Lynch letter section, which would likely be lost in the import process.

It would take me a couple of hours to write a tool that could be used to parse the export, find the content in each HTML file, import the pages, and process the embedded images. And we'll still end up with a bit of a mess, since much of the formatting would be lost. Cleaning up this formatting would require manual work on each post, in which case you may as well do the manual copy-paste in the first place. So, on balance, it doesn't seem like a great idea to attempt the import - I'd end up doing a bunch of work, but it wouldn't save much time, if any, for the team.

If the purpose of the import was simple preservation, I may be able to offer the ability to host a version of the archived course on the Commons webspace, with a Commons URL. But in this case it would not be editable as WordPress content.

Laurie, can you think about this and maybe talk it over with the Lehman folks? Let them know that, for technical reasons, we can't offer an import process that would preserve the appearance of the content (that they've obviously worked hard to establish on the Weebly site), and get a feel for how they'd like to move forward.

This can be done via script if we write an importer, but outside of this, it must be done manually.

That's true, the images could be uploaded statically and the images will work once the import is done.

It would be relatively easy to do a quick import if we set low expectations and that the Lehman editors will need to adjust parts of the page content, layout and site manually themselves. This will depend on how comfortable the editors are with WordPress. It would probably be good to find a basic theme as well.

I should note that the ZIP file Laurie provided has missing internal images. Check the beauty-standards.html in the ZIP file for one example. Here's what the page should look like: https://globalizationlehman.weebly.com/beauty-standards.html. Also, I modified my converter to work with the Weebly ZIP file and I've attached a screenshot of the same page on the Twenty Sixteen theme with the Classic Editor. Columns are retained, but styling is a little off as expected.

We could set up one site import for them to see if they will like it or not. If they find that the import is sufficient, we can move forward with the other three sites.