Migrate Moonfruit WordPress

Migrate from Moonfruit to WordPress

As Moonfruit is losing its Flash editor at the end of the year, so I am helping one of my clients to move his remaining websites across.

All of the pages have ID numbers in their URLs, so I use mod_rewrite to strip this out and point to a more human-readable structure. Also, if there is a separate mobile version of the website I mirror the desktop structure and add a further set of rules to offer mobile devices their own distinct pages (mirroring the behaviour of Moonfruit).

Step 1:

Create a new sub directory called “flat” or “moonfruit” and use wget to retrieve a copy of the existing website. Replace any mention of “current-website” and “.com” with your own domain.

mkdir ./flat
wget --mirror -p -P ./flat/ current-website.com
mv -f ./flat/current-website.com/* ./flat
rm -Rf ./flat/current-website.com

Step 2:

Rename pages from “/your-page/1234567890” (with no extension) to: “/your-page/index.html”. As this website only had 15 pages, the process was done manually.

Step 3:

Add some rules to handle the new URLs. I’ve also included a rule to use just one home page so you can delete the duplicate: “/flat/home/index.html”.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?current-website\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/home/?.$
RewriteRule .* flat/ [NC,QSA,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?current-website\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[a-z]+[0-9a-z-]*/[0-9]{10}$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ([a-z]+[0-9a-z-]*/)([0-9]{10}) flat/$1 [NC,QSA,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?current-website\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/flat.*$
RewriteRule (.*) flat/$1 [NC,QSA,L]

Step 4:

Check over the website using Console | Network and retrieve missing JavaScript, CSS and images. I copied these into a text file and used wget to retrieve all the files at one time.

Step 5:

Check for a separate mobile version of the website. This can be retrieved in a similar way using browser information in the wget command. I placed these files in a separate mobile directory and introduced new rules to load these pages for mobile browsers.

From flat HTML to WordPress

Once fully transferred, the flat HTML website is properly structured and laid-out in WordPress with URL redirections once the new website is ready to go live. There are a couple plugins that can automate the process if there are plenty of pages – but having all the files local and complete is a major part of the process. I would try out the plugin: HTML Import 2 as a starting point.

I am happy to help others with a comprehensive transfer from Moonfruit to either a flat HTML website or covert pages to editable WordPress pages. Please drop me a message at Design Extreme.

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