Frequently Asked Question

An efficient process to do such a conversion had not been documented, so once again, we had to perform extensive experimentation and analysis to find something that produced a HiveBrite page that could be modified easily and which accurately conveyed the original Encompass content. Finding such a process took us more than ten weeks, and it is not clear whether anyone other than the Class of 1964 tech staff have solved this problem.

HiveBrite has a Block Editor that was used to produce the pages created by the MIT Support staff for our class, and we tried a number of different techniques to use it. However, we eventually found that the Block Editor did not support internal links - that is, a link inside a web page that takes the user to another location within that same page. This made the Block Editor unusable for much of our existing Encompass content.

The good news is that HiveBrite also supports a "Classic Editor", which is actually much more powerful and user friendly. We recommend that the Classic Editor be used exclusively for migrated content, and probably for all content. It should be noted that the News editor within HiveBrite IS the Classic Editor.

Thanks to the hundreds of hours spent on testing, we have developed a process that converts a saved HTML file for an Encompass page into HTML that can be pasted into the Classic Editor, producing an almost perfect copy that can then be maintained in HiveBrite using the Classic Editor.

The conversion includes the same kind of URL transformation that we used for the PDFs, but also included transformation of the URLs used to fetch embedded content like images. In order to work properly, we depend on the [editor] and [editor_documents] folder hierarchies with all files to be copied from Encompass into a web-accessible location that preserves the structure.

For static content, however, we don't see an advantage to HiveBrite conversion, and do not plan to use it any more than necessary. Further, there does not seem to be any advantage to using the Block Editor, and we plan to avoid it except where mandated. In general, HiveBrite in its current state is missing a number of important features that are mandatory for website development and present in Encompass. See our FAQ that explores this subject.

[DES 5-13-2024]