Transfer Standard pages to TWiki

Notes and recommendations for the transfer of "standard web pages" to the TWiki.

How to transfer the content

When transfering pages to the TWiki several approaches are possible. See also the special instructions below, which apply to all cases.

Copy the html code to the TWiki page
TWiki handles both TWiki-style code and html code. It is, however, best to keep a page in one type of style, or keep at least large groups of lines in the same style. There are certain tags, where the equivalent may be missing in the TWiki-style (dt-tag, …) and html has to be used.
Include the original page as html file
The content of standard pages is between the lines
```
 <div id="content">  <!--  start of content .... 
              </div>   <!--  end of content ............ 
        
```
These lines and all lines included between them can be copied to a separate .html file, e.g. the "content" of hypernews.php can be copied to the file hypernewsHtml.html. This file can then be included both in the standard file (replacing the original sequence of lines) and the new TWiki page. This should be seen as a temporary fast solution, which keeps both pages alife until the full transition is done, but leaves only one source of code to be maintained. It decouples the transfer and the update of the URLs.
Rewrite the page
This is obviously always possible …

Changes to be made to the standard web html-code

The standard web makes everywhere use of the base-tag and the directory structure of the web layout. This has largely simplified the writing of the html code: URLs can be written in a very compact way. The naming of the replacement TWiki pages should be carefully planned, to make the replacement of the URLs as simple and safe as possible.
The formatting of the standard pages will be lost. Among others special formatting is defined in the css for code fragments. As mentioned already certain tags are not available for TWiki code. In this case the work can be minimized by keeping the original html code.

What can/cannot be transfered

There are several types of pages

Directory which cannot be transfered
The directory "links" makes use of soft links. There is no equivalent available on TWiki.
User-owned directories
Some users have specifically asked to have their pages on standard web and not on TWiki. The reasons may be technical or personal preference. Any user-maintained pages have to be clarified with the users, before changes are made.
The instructions for the "web team" contain many recommendations which are valid for any web, whether standard or TWiki.

Redirection of standard pages

Pages which are referenced by published documents or are frequently referenced from other web sites should be redirected to their replacement page, at least for an extended period.

Pages referenced by documents
For example: the just-published NIM paper of SIT references pages on the standard web; it would make a bad impression if those pages were no longer accessible.
TWiki pages point to the standard pages. This is specially true for pointers to the "links" directory.

If you transfer a page, for which you are not the maintainer, please inform the maintainer and Atlas.Webmaster before you start to work on the transfer.