My Rapid Weaver Classic site has a blog page with posts dating back to 2008 (Lander Theme). Mike Freeman Blog
I’m trying to rebuild my site in Elements but none of my blog posts imported to my blog page.
Is there a way to export those posts from Classic and or import them into Elements?
If not, any suggestions on how to recreate my blog post history in Elements?
What you need is to use the CMS in Elements. Unfortunately, it requires Markdown files.
So what you do is:
@dan if you’re reading this, what would you give me if I wrote a “How to make an Elements Blog” ebook (based on the site I sent you via email that I created with the Microblog project)? Not looking for money, but the CMS is such a pain point for so many it really needs a good step-by-step, point-by-point, explanation-by-explanation resource.
Let’s find a way to make this E-book happen.
Thom, thanks so much for this detailed info.
It does sound quite involved!
I’ll give it a try and see where I end up, but this may be above my ability/comprehension.
As you suggest, it would be great if Rapid Weaver created a quick easy way to make this happen without major surgery.
Thanks again for your reply.
I’d say that it’s a little convoluted, not involved. Once you have the right tools, it’s really just a matter of using them in the right order.
Thom, speaking of the right tools, I can’t get past step 1 so far. “Find the MarkDownload (MD) plug-in for Safari.”
Where do I find the Safari Markdown plugin? When I search for MarkDownload (MD) plug-in for Safari in the App store, all kinds of apps show up that have nothing to do with saving a page as a markdown file.
I’ve downloaded Mark Down Editor but it’s not a plugin. I downloaded Single File plugin that saves the page as html and I downloaded Copy Link in Markdown that copies only the link.
It’s also unclear to me if this method will maintain photos associated with my posts.
Correct.
I prefer One Markdown to Markdown Editor.
Also note that some of the Markdown things described in Markdown Editor don’t work in the CMS.
As for images, you should get them when you clip the page with MarkDownload. But it’ll be an inline reference. One of the things that just needs more step-by-step documentation is how to handle external image references in the CMS properly.
As I noted, the process is convoluted for the moment. It involves a lot of steps for each blog page you want to move from an existing site to an Elements CMS one. But if you do the process right a few times, it starts to become second nature. For sites with a ton of blog posts, you’ll be cranking for awhile. For that I’d recommend just staying in your old site and strip all your pages into Markdown with MarkDownload into a folder somewhere, then use One Markdown to clean them all up, and only then move them into Elements.
I posted this question a month ago. Since then, I tried following Thom’s instructions, I’ve watched and tried to follow instructions from several videos here, and I’ve downloaded and tried dissecting the sample blog project.
After a month of wrestling with this, I’ve gotten no where.
I was able to slowly figure out how to rebuild the rest of my Classic site in Elements, but the blog has proven to be very frustrating and not at all easy to put together or figure out. I don’t get it.
I’m not sure what to try or where to go from here in that regard.
We’d love to have you help out with the CMS documentation, and I’d be more than happy to pay you for your time. I’ll reply to that email soon, and hopefully we can get the ball rolling if you’re interested?
It’s unclear where you’re stuck, which makes it near impossible to help.
Do you have a folder containing your Markdown file(s) in the page structure? Are they named in undercase only with hyphens instead of spaces? Do the files have the extension .MD?
Do you have a page containing a CMS Collection in it that’s visible in the site structure? Have you used the YAML Frontmatter in Twig braces (e.g. {{item.title}})?
Do you have a page containing a CMS Single Post in it that’s not a visible page in the site structure? Have you used the YAML Frontmatter in Twig braces (e.g. {{item.body}})?
Do your Twig assertion names match the YAML Frontmatter names (e.g. title: “Hello World” is {{item.title}} in Twig)?
Is your blog page PHP not HTML?
I tried putting JPEGs in here to illustrate each point, but for some reason today those get stuck on uploading…
Just so people know, Dan and I are in communication behind the scenes and I’m sure that The Little Book of Elements CMS will appear sometime in the next month or so.
Thom, yes I copied the format of everything (pages, cms connections, md files) exactly from the Appleseed blog sample. The only difference is that the Appleseed blog is a stand alone blog site, mine is a menu on my site. There’s so much under the hood, I’m not sure how to show you exactly what I have and what is going wrong.
It took me a month before I saw and realized I had to change the pages from html to php. My blog page did finally come up in the browser preview correctly but the titles do not act as links to the md files as they should. The Archive page shows a “fatal error” with an entire page of code in the background.
I‘ve checked everything more than twice and can find no reason for it not to work. I did notice the php or cms seems to create is own folder structure. Nothing worked if I tried to use my own folder structure such as jazzvibe.com/mike-freeman/blog.php. It has to be jazzvibe.com/blog.php then it creates jazzvibe.com/blog/blog.php on it’s own. And it seems if anything is changed with the folder structure, the underlying cms connections all have to be x’d out and redone before it sort of works again.
The attached screen shots show what I have setup.
This is the heading I have on the MD files
-–
title: 2025 Year In Review Highlights
date: 2025-12-29
author: Mike Freeman
tags: []
categories: []
-–
not sure if this helps or this is what you are referring to, re publishing ignore if not, I will delete if so
Let’s try one thing at a time. First, titles.
Your YAML Frontmatter is not using quotes. This is risky and doesn’t work if certain characters are in the title, use this to see what happens:
title: “2025 Year in Review Highlights”
date: 2025-12-19
author: “Mike Freeman”
I’d also always put at least one tag with a post. Categories develop hierarchies, but right now you need to get the basics working. You can always go back into the .MD files and add tags and categories later.
In your references to the title in your CMS components, make sure that it is this:
{{item.title}}
I put the quotes in (I had actually taken them out to see if it made a difference). In the 1st screen shot below things look correct but the titles do not act as inks to the MD files. The second screen shot shows what happens when I preview the Archive page.
You have mismatching YAML references.
In the .MD frontmatter for your articles you have “author”.
In your posted by reference you use “item.author.name”.
This is one critical aspect of the CMS: references have to match.
Let’s get the basic stuff working before worrying about links.
