It's very much in beta
You can now import/migrate existing websites to Tidy with a few clicks. The importer crawls the public version of the site, so it's platform agnostic and you can import websites from any platform.
As websites differ quite a lot from each other, the current version of the importer can only handle a fraction of all sites. But, it's constantly evolving and the more you use it and fail, the more data we get on what we should teach it.
We always log every error you get, but if have questions/comments/bug reports, we welcome them all to support@tidycms.com
How it works
- You give it a URL
- The Importer fetches all the pages it can find on the site
- You're presented with a UI asking you to select the elements containing the navigation and the content areas of the page.
- Click import
- All pages and assets are imported and paths are re-written.
Why you can (but don't need to) select elements
If you tell Tidy what the navigation of your website is, Tidy replaces it with its own navigation component. Then when you create/delete pages the navigation is automatically updated. Tidy tries to apply the existing styles to its nav component so that it still looks the same. Currently, the importer supports two navigation levels.
You don't need to go through every page and select the navigation and content areas. When you select something, the importer selects the path of the selected element and if for example, the path to your navigation is body > nav on every page, then you only need to select it once and it's auto-selected on all other pages.
If you select content areas Tidy automatically makes them editable in the CMS.
Automatic template identification
By default all pages get their own template, but when you select elements, Tidy tries to identify which pages uses the same template.
Say you have page A and page B. As most navigations display the active page with a separate class, the nav often differs on A and B. The same goes for the content area, as the pages have different content. But, suppose we remove the navigation and the content area(s) from the code and then compare the HTML that remains. If the remaining code of A and B are identical, then we know they use the same template. And, when you import the new site Tidy will create template X and pages A and B, which will share that template. If you make changes to template X it will affect both A and B, but if you change content on A or B, it will only affect the page in question.
When you select/deselect elements in the importer you'll see live changes in the right column of the importer where Tidy groups the site pages by template. The fewer templates you want Tidy to create, the higher you need to select elements in the DOM tree.
Migrating websites to a new template
The current importer imports everything, layout and all. The next tool we're going to build is an importer where you can move content from existing sites to a new template in Tidy. This way you can import and simultaeously re-design entire websites with a few clicks. But that's still in development.
Have fun importing layout and all until then!