I researched how to set up WordPress on my local PC. It was WAY too technical for my taste. Then I found Instant WordPress, which hid most of the technical details. I used this a bit, but didn't have enough time to really make progress.

Now that I am retired, I decided to pick this project up again. I tinkered with Instant WP, but decided it was a bit TOO slow and opaque. I found Local WordPress, which makes it easy to install Wordpress.

I spent some time learning how to use WordPress. It handles web pages in a completely different way then FrontPage. Then I tried to find an easy way to import FrontPage HTML pages from my computer into WordPress.

I found a WordPress plugin to import HTML files directly: HTML-Import-2 by Stephanie Leary (2016) But it did not work.

Her code was on github. I looked at forks of her code, and found a more recent version that does work. I downloaded the code as a ZIP file, but could not install it as a WordPress plugin. I had to delete the readme.txt file from the ZIP to install as a plugin.

I imported a few HTML files from my site, and looked carefully at the results. It took quite a bit of manual editing to get the pages to look the way I wanted. Some pages had lots of "junk HTML code" in the imported files that was specific to Microsoft FrontPage.

In conclusion, it may be better to create the web pages manually, one at a time. I can copy / paste from my web site into NotePad. Then I need to copy the text into a new page in WordPress.

Last modified: December 07, 2024