We are well under way redesigning the Pontydysgu website. It is not so easy.

According to the archive the present site was launched in September, 2006. The WordPress site superseded on an older blog, the Wales Wide Web which was based on Plone and was itself three years old. We managed at that time to manually download at least some of the old post and reload them to the new WordPress site. WordPress was very different in 2006. It was still primarily a blogging site and to create a more magazine look, we had to manually code the different pages using post categories. According to the dashboard there are now 2330 posts, 93 pages and goodness knows how many links and images as well as multimedia files hosted on Pontdysgu.org. And Akismet claims it “has protected your site from 1,509,125 spam comments already”!

For the new site, we have chosen to use the WordPress Sense theme, preserving the magazine look. Sense seems more of a framework than a theme, with huge amount of functionality, which we are trying to get our heads around. We have designed on paper a new structure fr the site which will hopefully make it easier to find things. Once we have the menus in place we can begin the process of migrating old content to the site. Although WordPress supports XML export and input that does not really solve the problem. As I said before we used categories or allocating posts to different pages. But was also used categories as well categories. And there are now over 120 of them. There is a plugin to convert categories to tags, which is what the non-navigational categories more properly are. But we still somehow have to try at least semi automatically to get the old content onto the new navigation structures.

We also need to move the attachments and pictures over to the new site. And I guess we should take the opportunity to check for broken links and try to repair the. I am betting there will be a lot by now – many of which will be due to sites no longer existing.

Of course some of our plugins have aged over time. Our podcasts are supported by Podpress which no longer seems to be supported. So all those will need moving to a more modern plugin.

And so it goes on. We don’t have a release date yet, but I would like to get something up and running in the early summer. We will keep you updated with progress and will shout for help if we get stuck!