NC@WP

CHICAGO-lollie,

I only really mention XML because I don’t know of any alternative formats that are as easy to edit

Well, the easiest format to edit is plain text, of which CSV is a variation…

It’s a little hard to forget which information goes where in an XML.

Maybe, but it’s VERY easy to make a syntax error in XML. You forget a quote or a closing tag somewhere, and your entire file becomes useless…

Like I (very briefly) mentioned in the first post, I’m no coder.

This is exactly why you should reconsider using XML. First, you will have to figure out which, if any, XML processing extensions your host supports. Then, you’ll have to wrap your mind around using whatever XML parser is available, which is not for the faint-hearted. And that’s before you even begin to integrate your code into WordPress…

The database. More specifically, the [prefix]options table, where [prefix] is the table prefix you specified during installation (defaults to wp_).

Actually, even if you do go with the custom page option, you still can access the XML file from wherever it is; there’s no need to import it anywhere…

But speaking of XML, is it really necessary? Won’t CSV do the job? The reason I am asking is, PHP has several XML extensions, so if you move your WordPress from one host to another, you may find that the XML extension you had on the old host is not available on the new one.

It’s possible; you would need to write a plugin that would do it though…

There are two ways to do it.

One is that you develop (or hire someone to develop) a WordPress theme that matches your Web site. Depending on how elaborate your design is, it may take an experienced developer between one day and two weeks.

The other way is for you to fold your existing site into WordPress. As you may know, WordPress allows you to create Pages, which exist outside the flow of the blog and form a hierarchy of their own, in addition to blog posts. So what you can do is to take your existing pages and copy their content into WordPress pages. That way, your entire site, not just the blog, will be managed through WordPress.

“Subscribing” to a feed is somewhat of a misnomer, as no actual subscription (the kind you go through when subscribing, say, to a mailing list) takes place; people just access the feed whenever they feel like it (or their feed reading programs do it for them on schedule). Feeds are generally publicly available; no authentication is required to read feeds. So, unless you have feeds that require authentication (which is not normally done), it’s impossible to tell a subscriber to the feed from a hole in the ground…

Additionally, in WordPress, feeds simply convey information about recent posts and/or comments; unless you modify WordPress’ feed generation or use a third-party feed generator, you can’t put into a feed something that’s not in your posts/comments.

RenFromPenn,

Yes, you can downgrade from 2.5 (I’ve done it), but you will have to reset passwords for all users that ever logged into the 2.5 installation. Alternatively, you can export the blog into a WXR file, back up your uploads directory, remove 2.5 entirely, do a fresh install of 2.3.3, restore the uploads, and import the WXR.

Installation and configuration are relatively simple tasks once you’ve done them a couple times. There is even a free installation service, which, however, is severely backlogged at the moment, so they temporarily stopped accepting new requests. So there may be developers who wouldn’t mind throwing in the installation to get the job…

Are you making new directories for new plugins or just dumping PHP files into /wp-content/plugins?

There is no such thing as reasonable cost. “Reasonable” is a value judgment. Depending on how complex a theme you want, it may take anywhere between one day and two weeks to design and develop it. One day is eight billable hours, two weeks is at least 80 billable hours. Hourly rates vary widely; in the U.S., even dropping offshore developers from consideration, you’re still looking at a range between $20/hour (students and hobbyists, some are quite good) and well in excess of $100/hour (full-service shops with office overhead). I looked at your profile and it says you’re in UK, so I don’t know how relevant my U.S. guesstimates are for your locale…

As to installation and configuration, it’s something that normally takes about an hour; some server environments are tricker than others though, so they may need a little extra coaxing…

You need to change the <OBJECT> tag to something like this:

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 style="float:right; padding-left:10px; padding-top:10px;
 padding-bottom:10px"
 data="https://gamezig.com/Abrahms.swf"
 width="300"
 height="300"
<PARAM NAME="movie" VALUE="https://gamezig.com/Abrahms.swf">
<PARAM NAME="quality" VALUE="high">
<PARAM NAME="wmode" VALUE="transparent">
<PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#FFFFFF">
<EMBED src="https://gamezig.com/Abrahms.swf"
 quality="high" wmode="transparent" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
 width="300" height="300" name="Abrahms"</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

The reason your Flash applet works in Firefox but not in IE is that Firefox gets the applet from the URL specified in the <EMBED> tag, which contains the full URL. IE, meanwhile, uses the URL specified in the movie parameter or in the data attribute of the <OBJECT> tag…

OK, here’s an experimental, but nevertheless functional plugin that restricts access to a post or page based on the user’s login name or ID number.

Are the existing site’s postings stored in a database?

ForumJoiner,

The zip file is 1.44 MB and the tar.gz file is 1.2 MB.

Why?

Because these are different archiving formats. Even with the same archiving program using the same archive format, you can specify different settings (for example, you may compress to maximize extraction speed or to minimize the size of the archive file), which will result in a different archive size…

Depends on how well organized your current content is and how well its current structure matches the structure of your WordPress pages…