Blog Migration Guide

Introduction

Background

The University of Derby (UoD) blog is one of our oldest websites. It currently runs on Wordpress and has not seen a significant update to its design or functionality in several years. As a result, it is currently very dated, both from a technical and a design standpoint. Additionally, it is hosted on a separate system to our current website which requires an ongoing investment commitment and also unnecessary technical overhead. For these reasons, we have decided to bring the blog into the main UoD website, give it an update and a design refresh, as well as streamlining the discovery and navigation process to make relevant content more readily available and to encourage engagement and interaction with the institution.

The blog currently contains nearly 500 posts, many of which contain content which remains relevant to the University, and some of which is used by students, educators, and the private sector many months after publication. Rather than begin again with an entirely new, empty, blog we are going to move over the current content to the new blog, tidying up and ensuring that the content meets our new, higher, standards for web content. Content will need to be ported over and reformatted to fit with our new CMS and additional content may need to be sourced and assets may need to be updated. Because the old blog and the new website are completely disparate systems, and also due to the infrastructure of the website, it is impossible for us to automate this process (and nor do we wish to), so this is to be completed manually.

General Guidance

Migration order

Migration must take place from oldest post to newest post. This is to ensure that any newer blog posts that contain backlinks to older posts are updated appropriately (see Links below).

Text

Text from the blog post must be copied in plain text format this can be done either by copying the text into a text editor (ensure that it is set to “plain text”) or by copying without styling (Cmd+Shift+V on Apple Mac or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows). This will remove any extra hidden code added by Wordpress when the page is created.

Links

Internal links must be recreated as section links. All links, in accordance with UoD guidelines, must open in the same tab.

Images

Images which are used in the Section Config as thumbnail images must conform to the following guidelines:

• 4:3 aspect ratio

• Minimum of 400px in their shortest dimension

• Passed through https://tinyjpg.com

Images to be used in the blog post itself must conform to UoD guidelines on image content.

The Old Blog

The old blog is powered by wordpress. All blogs posts have the same format and should look more or less as illustrated:

Open

You should be able to complete all migration directly from the blog page, without using the Wordpress administration

The New Blog

Structure

The new blog resides in the “blog” section of t4 which is currently situated under “Work in Progress”.

The Blog homepage content is located within the main “Blog” section.

Blog posts are placed in sections within the “Posts” section which is further divided into separate years and months. Note that the structure of the posts is purely for organisational purposes. This does not determine the actual publish date or ordering of posts, it simply makes it easier for us to find and administrate posts. Individual posts are created as sections within their publish year/month, named with the title of the blog post (see “Blog Title” for more information.

Within the “Blog” is also where the category listings pages live. These sections are generally empty except for the code that generates the list itself and a section config file.

Generally, when migrating blog content you will not need to alter the content within the “Blog” section itself or the category sections, you will only be adding and altering content within the “Posts” section.

Open

Anatomy of a Blog Post

Blog posts themselves are quite simple and are made up of a minimum of three general parts:

Pattern Hero.

This consists of two elements, the title of the blog post, which is in the heading, and a small piece of text in the feature block. These should both be completed for every blog post.

Text Block(s)/Media embeds/Other content.

This should contain the content of the blog post. There may be more than one of these if the blog is particularly long, or split up by media content.

Section Config

This contains all the meta-information for the blog. For example, what categories the blog post belongs to, the post date, the blog author, the publish date and so on.

The Pattern Hero

This is populated with three pieces of information:

The name. This must be a descriptive name, for example, “Pattern hero - My Erasmus Experience”, this is to ensure that they are clearly marked in our approval queues.

The heading. This is just the title of the blog post. This is formatted automatically by the CMS, so there is no need to change this to a heading or any other formatting. The only thing to note here is that all of our content uses title case for headings. They will display in upper case, but the underlying content is always title case.

The feature block. Most blogs already have an introductory piece of content. This is usually the first paragraph and is displayed in bold in the blog post. Text from the blog post must be copied in plain text format this can be done either by copying the text into a text editor (ensure that it is set to “plain text”) or by copying without styling (Cmd+Shift+V on Apple Mac or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows). This will remove any extra hidden code added by Wordpress when the page is created. This is used for both the introduction, and also for the abstract.

Text Block

This is the main content of the blog. This must be given a descriptive name, for example, “Text block - My Erasmus Experience”, this is to ensure that they are clearly marked in our approval queues.

This will consist of one or more text block content types, plus potentially media embeds, depending on the nature of the blog post. Text from the blog post must be copied in plain text format this can be done either by copying the text into a text editor (ensure that it is set to “plain text”) or by copying without styling (Cmd+Shift+V on Apple Mac or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows). This will remove any extra hidden code added by Wordpress when the page is created. Once copied you should re-apply any styling to the blog post manually. Note that headings in the main blog text must start at H2 and go down from there. When adding links back in, please note that internal links must be added as section links.

Section Config

The section config contains all of the setup and configuration data for our blog posts. It must be given a descriptive name, for example, “Section config - My Erasmus Experience”, this is to ensure that they are clearly marked in our approval queues. It is important that this is completed correctly or blog posts will not function as expected. Below are the fields which must be filled in. You can ignore any fields in the section config which are not directly referenced below.

Abstract

The abstract is in the Excel sheet listed under “description”

Thumbnail Image Rectangle

This image is used on both the homepage of the blog (for the most recent blog posts), and also in the category listings pages. If possible, use the image from the existing blog post. If an image needs to be replaced please use one of the following resources to source an appropriate new image:

Unsplash

Pexels

Pixabay

The thumbnail image must be in 4:3 aspect ratio and must be run through tinyJPG (see General guidance)

Content-type Tag

This MUST be set to “Blog Post” or the post will not be displayed on the website.

Start or publish date

This must be set to the publish date of the blog post.

Blog post category

This should be set to the category or categories that the blog post belongs to. Note that we have streamlined the categories so there are fewer now than on the original blog. Use your judgement to decide which categories to place the blog in if it’s current category has been removed.

The Migration Process

The majority of the migration consists of opening the existing blog posts, and copying/pasting content into the new CMS system. There may be some minor alterations to existing content, and images may need special attention. All content can be copied directly from the blog posts, you will not require access to the current blog administration system to complete this task.

There is an excel sheet for administering the blog migration process available here:
https://unimailderbyac.sharepoint.com/:x:/r/sites/DigitalMarketingTeam/Shared Documents/Projects/2019-20 projects/12. Blog Migration/blog-feed-migration-MASTER.xlsx?d=wbcb64b1a128c4c4e9c7a3961be151bfe&csf=1&e=MX09ne

As you migrate blog post content you should initial each column from “Content” onwards as you complete the migration process. Please note that some of the migration processes won’t be completed on the first pass, so some columns should remain blank. Going through the excel sheet from left to right, here are the areas that need to be migrated:

Content

This is the main text of the blog. On the new blog, this lives in the Text block(s). When copying this over, do not include the title, or the abstract (See Abstract below) in the main content. When you copy and paste the content you should strip out any formatting either by pasting into a text editor as plain text first, or by pasting without formatting.

Note that headings should start at H2 and work their way down from there (the main blog post title is the page H1).

Abstract

The abstract is a small piece of introductory text which is used in two places in the blog. Firstly, it should be added to the Pattern hero in the Feature block field, and secondly in the Section config under Abstract. Most blog posts should have an abstract which is differentiated by being the first paragraph under the title, and is in bold:

Neither the feature block, nor the abstract should have any style formatting applied to them, however, the feature block can have links within it. The abstract is an important part of the blog post, so if your post does not have one, please note this in the excel sheet so we may create on later.

Thumbnail

The thumbnail is used on both the homepage of the blog for new content, and also in the listing page as preview images. The thumbnails is added to the Section config under Thumbnail image rectangle - do not use Thumbnail image square or the image will not be displayed. Images must be 4:3 aspect ratio. Use right click and “Save image as”, and then crop and upload the image to the media gallery, and give it an appropriate alt tag. All images for the blog should be saved in the Blog → posts folder of the media gallery.

You can use https://croppola.com/ to resize image. Upload your image and then click 4:3 in the black box on the right. You can resize the crop by dragging on the corners of the white rectangle (it will stay in 4:3), and then click “Download this crop”

Categories

All blogs can be tagged with one or more categories which are listed near the bottom of the main blog content, above the comments. We have completely removed tags and vastly reduced the number of categories for the new blog, so you may need to alter which category each blog belongs to. Use your judgement to determine the best fit for your particular blog post. Categories are added to the Section config under Blog categories. Note that when previewing your post you will see more categories than you have added. These are related categories and are added automatically.

Date

This is the date that the blog was published and is listed under Start or Publish date in the Section config. It is essential that this is populated correctly or the blog post may behave unexpectedly and the category and home page listings may not function correctly. You can find the publish date underneat the author information on the right hand side of the blog header image.

Author

Please ignore this column for now. We are currently redesigning the author system to accommodate the blog and will add the authors in later

Links

For SEO purposes, all blog posts should have three internal, and three external links (if possible). If your post does not meet these guidelines, if you can find an appropriate place to add a link in, then please do so. If not make a note in the Links column

Output URI

This is very important, and must be completed for every blog post. Because of the structure of the blog, we require all posts to have their output URI manually set as we build them. The output URI can be found by going into the General tab of the blog post, and then scrolling down to Output URI. You should be able to copy the existing output URI for the current blog post. Note that we only want the last part of the current URI for the output URI, without the slashes. For example:
For https://blog.derby.ac.uk/2020/01/my-joint-honours-experience/ - the Output URI would be my-joint-honours-experience

For https://blog.derby.ac.uk/2020/01/returning-to-work-after-maternity-leave-how-can-performance-psychology-help/ the Output URI would be returning-to-work-after-maternity-leave-how-can-performance-psychology-help

and so on.

Output URI prepended

Please ignore this column. This is for future work.

New URL

Please ignore this column. This is for future work.

QA

Please ignore this column, this is for final Quality Assurance