Can I backup my whole site customizations (CSS/HTML)? Not the photos

net1994

I have a pro account and when I built my site I used the 'Advanced Customization' and not one of the canned templates. The site uses custom HTML edits and is very heavy on CSS scripting. I don't want to lose all of this manual work. I'm trying to do this before the switch over on the 15th to the new format. Is there a utility or something where I can save not only this stuff, but all other account settings? Please don't tell me I will have to copy/paste all the scripts :-(

I know someone might say "it will all be saved," but I want this backup if I'd like to ever create my own non-smugmug site and I could use this work.

FYI: I'm not trying to backup the photos themselves. Just the design of the site and the account settings.

Hikin' Mike

Your CSS from your Legacy site will NOT work on the new Smugmug. If you are using Javascript, none of this works because the new Smugmug doesn't support it.

net1994

Yes, I do know this. I want to back it up for future reference.

ChancyRat

net1994 wrote: »

I have a pro account and when I built my site I used the 'Advanced Customization' and not one of the canned templates. The site uses custom HTML edits and is very heavy on CSS scripting. I don't want to lose all of this manual work. I'm trying to do this before the switch over on the 15th to the new format. Is there a utility or something where I can save not only this stuff, but all other account settings? Please don't tell me I will have to copy/paste all the scripts :-(

I know someone might say "it will all be saved," but I want this backup if I'd like to ever create my own non-smugmug site and I could use this work.

FYI: I'm not trying to backup the photos themselves. Just the design of the site and the account settings.

So you can copy out the advanced customization CSS for backup.... but you know this part.
For my own HTML galleries, I did do a manual copy/paste of all of them before I unveiled. I don't know how many you have and whether that would be a gargantuan task or not. I advise doing that though, because some HTML may not work exactly right in New SM.

Are you viewing your site in New mode yet? To look at any of the galleries that have HTML, to see what has happened?

I believe - someone else may have to answer this part, that the CSS in your "advance customization" area in Old SM, will not populate into the "Site wide Customization" field in your Theme in New SM. If you're playing in the 'sandbox', you can check this directly.

ChancyRat

By the way, IF I'm remembering correctly, there is no tool for Legacy that downloads all the HTML you have on your site. However, in the NEW world, there is a Chrome extension created by Nicholas Sherlock, that will do a complete backup of all your CSS and HTML customization.

http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=240752

Can't say enough about this outstanding tool. Not only does it back up your site, it has a bug-free bulk-photo edit tool that reproduces the tool that Legacy has (that was always buggy). You can also generate a complete list of galleries in HTML or csv format, and you can populate that list with the permalink codes for all the galleries.

You could use this tool now, and, since you can play in the 'sandbox,' run it and back up your current HTML. The only issue may be that the HTML is broken in some cases.

I hope I'm remembering this part correctly also - but - some older HTML will LOOK right on the browser, but on opening Customization and going into the description, some code will/might break at that point. On saving and publishing, the page will then be broken. To plan for this, back up the HTML either manually out of OLD, or using the Chrome tool in NEW, before you open and edit any gallery description in NEW mode.

I do remember it was painful to do all the backups - but it was very worth it to have control over modifying and updating the HTML in individual galleries.

ChancyRat

If you're a great HTML and CSS coder, you can probably ignore my warnings. I'm terrible at coding, so I had limped along for a couple of years with bad code looking "okay" to viewers. It was painful to have to learn more about HTML and CSS after I unveiled, in order to fix broken galleries, but it was for the better in the long run. Likely only poor coders like me are the only ones who really suffer with unveiling terrible HTML.

ChancyRat

Now it's coming back to me, some of what I went through. Before I unveiled, for many galleries where I had HTML - which, in Legacy, meant in the Description - I left the code alone in the description, and duplicated it into an HTML content block. There I tweaked it and added CSS as needed. When I had the code correct in the content block, I deleted it from the description field.

Many folks on this forum will say, just use a Page if you're going to use HTML content blocks like this, but I didn't want to change my URLs or naming structure. Plus I found myself adding more complex HTML than I ever used in the description field in a legacy gallery.

WinsomeWorks

At the very bottom of your "Advanced Customizations" page in Legacy, that page where you see all your code, there's a little button that says "Email it" or something almost like that. If you click that, SmugMug will email you a copy of all your customizations-- the HTML, Javascript, CSS, all of it. I click that every time I've changed something, and have always gotten the whole thing emailed to me right away. Others have told me to save it in "plain text", which I gather does not mean email, so I was planning to copy each box & paste into NotePad as well before publishing my new site. As you've already heard though, there are only parts of it that will actually work in NewSmug or in any other place. Lots of it was especially geared to Old Smug & won't do you any good elsewhere. But if you've saved it all, you can sort that out in the future.

net1994 wrote: »

I have a pro account and when I built my site I used the 'Advanced Customization' and not one of the canned templates. The site uses custom HTML edits and is very heavy on CSS scripting. I don't want to lose all of this manual work. I'm trying to do this before the switch over on the 15th to the new format. Is there a utility or something where I can save not only this stuff, but all other account settings? Please don't tell me I will have to copy/paste all the scripts :-(

I know someone might say "it will all be saved," but I want this backup if I'd like to ever create my own non-smugmug site and I could use this work.

FYI: I'm not trying to backup the photos themselves. Just the design of the site and the account settings.