Cutting and pasting might be a disaster, but it also might be your best bet!

FrontPage was a reasonably aweful product from a "programmers" point of view; which is why it is no longer supported/maintained by Microsoft. If we're totaly honest here (no offense intended) front page was only ever used by people who didn't know what they were doing. (Bloated code, SEO sucked, compatability issues, not cross-browser happy, made decisions "for you", etc..)

Alas, your old front page site will likely be a bit of a beast of a project to convert if you have a lot of pages. Sorry.

You could also try farming it out overseas using RentACoder.com or something.

"front page was only ever used by people who didn't know what they were doing."

Actually most people who did know what they were doing used Frontpage. FrontPage was an innovate product and a leader in it's day. It just got old as technology surpassed it. I can and have coded entire HTML sites by hand. Frontpage made site creation a 100x faster in it's day. That's the difference between those of us who have been around since the mid 90's and those who started recently.

Anyone else got any real ideas based on real experience? There were millions of Frontpage sites... someone must have come across a solution.

I'm not looking for opinion.

Opinions aside, the real problem has nothing to do with FrontPage's poor rendition of HTML.

The actual problem is that the content on your FrontPage site is not contained within a database, but rather is contained within the HTML on each of your individual pages. You're essentially trying to import a static site into a CMS. The meta tags add an additional challenge.

On a modern CMS site such as Joomla, WordPress or Drupal, there is separation between the appearance (handled by themes or templates) and the content (contained within a database). Converting data from one to another, while somewhat challenging, is still conceivably possible. And the conversion would not be affected by the design of the front-end template or theme

But in your case there is no separation of content and appearance, so writing a "general purpose" FrontPage to WordPress converter is not feasible. Writing a one-case program to convert your site would probably be doable using PHP and CURL, but it might take more effort than the manual cut & paste effort that you are trying to avoid.

One bizarre thought would be to use a text-based browser like Lynx to view the site and then save it as a text file. Still would involve a lot of manual effort, but it might be easier to parse than the raw FrontPage-generated pages.

Best of luck with whatever approach you decide to take.

Bill

Wordpress will be the best solution for this. You should use wordpress. In wordpress you just need to copy and pasting the contents from the frontpage to the wordpress pages from wordpress admin section which is too easy.

Get your wordpress website designed and developed 1st and then start posting the contents from the frontpage website to the wordpress website. This is too easy task.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks
-Manish

If you choose Wordpress, then the best solution would be this plugin.
WordPress › Import HTML Pages WordPress Plugins Or just hire a data entry freelancer at odesk to copy and paste the pages into Wordpress. You'll find lots of freelancers there willing to do it for $50 or even less.

Thanks Harrison. The plugin requires the data be on the same server so that's out... but I appreciate your input... the most relevant of all.

Most of the other responses are not even remotely helpful. Doing it manually is idiotic. Computers are designed to automate tasks.

It's just data. I've already managed to pull it into XML now to figure out how to feed it into RSS so I can pull it back into the blog.

I should learn not to expect much from Forums. For every 1 good comment there are a dozen chiming in who have no real idea how to do anything but just want to see their name in writing. Crass I know... but I often wonder why people bother stating opinions based on no experience.

I have no problem with comments like Netman's although they don't offer a solution. But it's just plain idiotic to say Frontpage is aweful or use Wordpress. It's pretty easy to see why so many people are not making money.

Moderator: Please close and delete thread.

OMG. Wordpress is not the one stop solution for web design. In fact, I'm going to do a test, and those of you that bang out adsense sites, or sell a product or ebook. I GUARANTEE that you will make more money with a joomla or drupal site.

I'm looking for something like this to help a potential client (he has a large text-based MS Frontpage site that needs to be turned into a Wordpress site).

InternetMarketingIQ, did you ever find a good solution for this?

Thanks.

Hey marketingIQ!

Did you find a good solution to this?

If you did please let me know! I really need your help