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How Do I ... Convert a Page of Asset Links

The old CMS had a feature called autoindexer that would create pages of links to document assets in PDF, DOC or other file format. We are working to bring that functionality to the new CMS, but for now those pages will need to be manually migrated. Here is a way to do this. You will need an external text editor that supports find and replace options like, TextEdit (Mac), NotePad (Win), TextWrangler(Mac), SuperEdit (Win), etc.

NOTE: There may be page links and asset links in the same page, so be careful when doing a global find and replace on all items. Page links start with /content/mysite_vt_edu/en/ while asset links start with /content/dam/mysite_vt_edu/

  1. You will want two browser windows open and your preferred external text editor. This will allow you to quickly use keyboard navigation to copy-and-paste between applications and windows.
  2. Open the page on the existing live website
  3. Open the new page in a separate browser window, not tab, window
  4. Go back to the existing page and select the text that contains the links to assets
  5. Copy the text to the clipboard (Command+C [Mac], Ctrl+C [Win])
  6. Go to the new page and drag and drop a Text component onto the page (if none exists)
  7. Click the component title to show the tools menu
  8. Click the Edit--pencil icon--button
  9. Click the Expand button, third from right just left of the "X", this will open the enhanced text tool
  10. Paste the text from the existing page (Command+V [Mac], Ctrl+V[Win])
  11. Click the View Source button in the menu bar. It is third from the far right and looks like a dog eared page with this set of symbols </> in it. This is what gives us the raw HTML for what the text editor in Ensemble interprets.
  12. Select all of the text (Command+A [Mac], Ctrl+A [Win])
  13. Copy the text to the clipboard (Command+C [Mac], Ctrl+C [Win])
  14. Switch to your external text editor (Command+TAB [Mac], Alt+TAB [Win])
  15. Create a new file (if you're using TextEdit on the Mac you will also need to convert the file to plain text by hitting Command+T; you may also need to check to make sure your text editor is using plain text)
  16. Paste the HTML from the clipboard (Command+V [Mac], Ctrl+V [Win])
  17. Check for page links  If you have page links in with document links you will need to convert the page links first and separately. Page links end in .html
    For page links you will need to strip off the http://www.mysite.vt.edu and replace it with /content/mysite_vt_edu/en the change should look something like this:
        http://www.mysite.vt.edu/about/about.html        /content/mysite_vt_edu/en/about/about.html
    Do not use the global find and replace methods until you've changed any links like this manually. You do not have to convert links that go outside your site.
  18. If you had page links, complete those. Then use the text editor's find and replace feature to find the beginning URL string, e.g., http://www.mysite.vt.edu and replace it with the path to the assets in the Digital Asset Manager, e.g., /content/dam/mysite_vt_edu
  19. Click Replace All
  20. Select all the text in the external text editor
  21. Copy the text to the clipboard
  22. Switch to the new page browser window where the raw HTML is showing in a text edit window
  23. Paste the text from the clipboard
  24. Click the View Source button
  25. Click the Collapse button, far right of menu
  26. Click the check mark to save