Since I made the leap to WordPress this year I have been worrying about how to import many years of legacy NucleusCMS content.
NucleusCMS?
NecluesCMS is/was a simple and very lightweight blogging system. It was multiuser and multi blog before it was cool. It is also not massively content centric and a touch too procedural despite having been an amazing gateway to Object Oriented programming. I owe the NucleusCMS so much community for my current skill set.
I love NucleusCMS, it was simple and let me use my PHP skills to get done what needed to be done. These days, however, I prefer to focus on content and only content. I do use PHP and all that but only when I must.
However, WordPress is what I need and so all that content must be ported over. I have invested years into content and SEO for a few domains and I want to get back to using them.
Is Gutenberg the right call?
This is what I am having trouble deciding. Is Gutenberg the right call for me?
My thoughts so far have all been along the lines of creating a custom post type or custom tables as a halfway house.
But I have been thinking. What if I created reusable blocks like “this post is imported and not yet checked” etc.. What if the meta data such as old URL, first date of publishing, import date, etc. were information panels after the content. Blocks can do that in Gutenberg.
Which got me thinking. What if an import (complete with metadata) could just be a block. I wouldn’t have to worry about render differences – I could code a legacy render. “All” I would need to do would be to create a custom block type.
Sure, I’m still going to hell of a time handling the different ways NucleusCMS and WordPress handle media and comments but it could work.
I could also make creating new content for old projects like Badly Drawn Adventures easier enough that they might get made.
Some projects – especially Fact-o-page (tag pages on steroids) – will have to be redone from scratch but I planned to do that anyway.
I just don’t know
The truth is I just don’t know. I have never coded for Gutenberg before. I have coded for WordPress and could do pretty much anything with NucleusCMS.
I’m probably going to pre-convert text that [[looks like this]] but other than that… There is a heck of a lot of BB style markup in that legacy stuff.
If you have any thoughts, please let me know.
