What’s New with the HHP

... from Movable Type to WordPress.

The spine of the Holocaust Historiography Project site consists of "static" HTML files, which are maintained by hand.

However, there is also the large and growing "Clippings" section, which until today was handled by Movable Type. Movable Type is a "blogging" platform that -- when set up correctly -- combines the best of a dynamic site with the best of a static site.

Unfortunately, a couple of years ago Movable Type discontinued its free version, and for a modest site such as ours the price of admission to the paid version was out of the question.

This lack of a free ("community") version of Movable Type left us high and dry. Without a continuing stream of updates, we were at risk of security holes in the older version we were using. However, WordPress at that time did not accept entry dates prior to 1970, due to its reliance on the UNIX date scheme.

As luck would have it, though, the current version of WordPress contains a built-in work-around for the UNIX date limitation. This meant that, with a bit of work converting items from Movable Type to WordPress, we could finally transition to a modern blogging platform.

There are still some rough edges, but most of the content is still there. Now we just have to fix the broken links, massage the formatting, and generally integrate the new Clippings section with the old static pages.

Labels: site news