I’ve recently been impressed with a very simple Content Management System called GetSimple. It provides just the very basics that allows a user to edit their own website content. For brochure sites with owners who don’t want the complexity of a larger CMS, I think it is pretty ideal.
When I develop a site though, I typically have a header and footer, and then all of the content pages exist as PHP files that simply include that header and footer. Converting a static site like that into the CMS takes a bunch of copy/pasting. I always try to avoid such tedious jobs, and so developed a script that will import those static pages into a GetSimple installation.
To run this script, I wanted to import a bunch of files in a ‘static’ directory where I had moved all of the static files to. I then ran this from the command line to import all of the content into GetSimple
# for file in `find static -type f` > do > ./getsimple_import_file.php $file > done
The script is available as getsimple_import_file.php
It takes a little configuration before running it. It works by simulating the data that you would submit when creating the page through the web interface, so we have to fake the necessary session cookie. Uncomment the bit in the middle that will display your cookie and run the script once. You’ll need to copy your cookie name and value into the script before doing any actual imports.
Once you’ve done that, you will probably want to change the regular expression that attempts to grab the page title from your file. You may also want to manipulate how it figures the URL to use.
Feel free to post comments here if you found this useful, or made any changes you’d like to share with other users