Migration Intro & Next Steps

If your site currently resides on WebManager 3, you are able to have the pages and images converted over to WebManager 4 and preserve your content without needing to start over. However, there are a few additional steps required in order to make the site "public", which are described below.

Carry-overs from WebManager 3

Although your migrated site now lives on a temporary staging (migration.salvationarmy.org) URL within WebManager 4, it may not look "complete" upon first viewing. This is because the migration process:

• Does not convert your number based URLs to human-readable automatically.
• Does not organize your pages structurally to fit within the skin's navigation.
• Does not keep the separation of Left and Center content that exists in WebManager 3. Left side pages become normal pages.
• Does not add pages to the dropdown menu.

While this list may look daunting, it can actually be a blessing in disguise. Going through each page will enable you to audit the content and ask the hard questions of whether or not you still need the content, if the content can be changed/updated, or if pages can be combined in order to streamline the experience for your visitors.

Therefore, on each individual page that you open, you will want to:

1. Change the URL Alias to something human-readable by replacing the string of numbers with something representative of the page. This ensures that each page on your site will have a search engine friendly URL, instead of the string of numbers that automatically come over with migrations from version 3.6 of WebManager
2. Choose either "Show" or "Hide" in menus. The pages appear in the top and footer menus appear automatically if they are checked to Show in Menus. After initially migrating, your site may have quiet a few top nav items due to this Show in Menus setting being checked for all pages. Or conversely, you may see empty dropdown menus due to needing to open the pages and select Show in Menus. Consider narrowing down your list of top-level pages to 5-6 and then make any other pages you want to have in the navigation set to be child pages, so they appear in the dropdown menu. Note thet only one level of pages under the top level will appear in dropdown menus.
3. Choose to either "Show" or "Do Not Show" the navigation bar. Checking Show Navigation Bar creates the sidebar on the left with links to other pages in the same level as that page. So if the page is on the top level - i.e. Home, About, etc - it will show all other top level pages in that left sidebar. If the page is a child page of Camp, along with other pages like "Black Hills Camp" or "Gene Eppley Camp and Retreat Center", then the other pages on the same child-level as that page will show in the left hand navigation.
4. Choose whether to Publish or Unpublish the page. If there are pages that you want to keep but hide from site searches and navigation, simply click on "Unpublish". Similarly you can also delete any pages you no longer need.
5. Lastly, you will want to use the "Layout" section in the top right of each page editor in order to drag and drop the pages into the order you'd like them in. Simply click and hold your mouse on a page to drag them as child pages, or in a certain order. You can also do this from the main website settings screen. 

Once your site is ready to go public, the next steps will be:

1. Contact your Territorial web person in order to have the live URL attached to your site. It may be http://something.salvationarmy.org/site_name or it could be http://sitename.org but either way this needs to be configured through your THQ. If you choose to use a custom domain, please see our Typography section for information on integrating typekit.
2. Redirect the old site's URLs to the new pages. This is also done at the THQ level, but it allows all old bookmarks, links and search engine results for your old WebManager 3 site to automatically bring visitors to your new pages!