Importing Sites to MX 2004

[rogerd]

I finally decided to move out of the dark ages and purchased DW MX2004. I've got a ton of sites in DW3 & DW4 that I'd like to import. It looks like the freeware MM-Exporter will do that, but I'm running into a glitch where it seems to import the converted site data but they don't appear in the DW Site Manager.

Is MM-Exporter the best way to accomplish this? It seems odd that the MX2004 software itself doesn't have this facility built in, but I can't locate it in the menus or documentation. I could manually set them up, of course, but I'm assuming there's a shortcut way to do this. Ideas?

[rogerd]

Hmmm, seems like there's no shortcut. MM-Exporter couldn't handle the DW3 sites. It ran without error, but the file it produced wasn't right. The author confirmed that he didn't test for or expect DW3 compatibility.

What was Macromedia thinking? Is there some huge advantage to storing site info in the registry instead of a neat little config file that would be easy to backup and convert? BTW, I highly recommend using the backup feature of the export software. That seems to work like a champ, and has already saved me a bunch of work when an "upgrade" hosed my Registry settings.

[caine]

certainly for all the moves that i have done, it has been manual. Not aware of anything that would successfully do this.

Another thing to watch out for is the compliancy level of the HTML standards in the various DW's, i noticed quite a major difference between 4 and MX.

[rogerd]

I've resigned myself to manually redefining the sites. The MM-Export looks like it would have worked if I had upgraded my DW3 sites to DW4/Ultradev, but I never bothered to do so because it didn't seem worth the effort. Either way, it ends up a manual process.

The ability to create compliant HTML (claimed for DW-MX) was one good reason to switch. It just seems like a major oversight not to provide an easy upgrade path. Busy designers may have hundreds of sites defined.