I’m looking for tools or libraries that load simple but old existing websites and produce an output which can be loaded into wordpress or other CMS. The goal is to keep the existing websites navigating structure and content.
Any hints?
Are there good tools which help migrating an existing Website to a CMS-based site?
What I’ve discovered is that it really depends upon the CMS. I would recommend a “tag-pair”-based CMS like the new Craft or ExpressionEngine’s free Core version (there’re others too) where you drop in a looping control area, replace the fields with the tags and then it just runs. I personally like those because they offer a cleaner separation between content and design.
I’m trying to learn WordPress now and it’s backwards of what you want – you create template environments and half the design seems to be controlled by the code. Great if you want to swap generic templates around, but if you customize them you’re doing a lot of work. I’m looking at a site I inherited and conditional statements are a nightmare – half in the templates and other in the plugins themselves (Events, I’m looking at you).