OH2 Rule Confusion

I setup OH2 and did a fresh pairing of my zwave devices via HABmin (I moved recently so it was easier to just repair rather than migrate the OH1 config). All went well with discovery and I am able to control lights, etc.

I am now trying to port my rules over, but I a bit confused as to how to do so because:

  1. I’ve used Smarthome Designer in the past and see there is a new OH2 version, but with OH2 I don’t see any item files in conf/items (a side effect of auto discovery?). Not sure how the designer would work without that.
  2. I could just move my OH1 rules files into conf/rules, but I was hoping to validate them as the names surely have changed (see Front_Door_Light in the example below)
  3. Should I use the experimental next-gen rule engine?
    http://docs.openhab.org/configuration/rules-ng.html

Perhaps I’m just missing the obvious here… any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Dave

My rules are very simple, for now, see below.
But I do intend on writing more complex rules hence the “high level” questions above

rule "nightLightsOn"
    when
                // 6:45pm every day
            Time cron "0 45 16 1/1 * ? *"
    then
            sendCommand(Front_Door_Light, ON)
    end

You need to write that manually.
You get the channel def from paperUI.

Example:
Dimmer WallplugStuaCornerLamp "Lampe (sofa)" <dimmablelight> (livingRoom, lights) { channel = "zwave:device:f180343d:node13:switch_dimmer" }

Did you have a chance to read this migration docs here:
http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html
There may be more things to know for you that changed from OH1.8 to OH2 and you will find most answers in there.
Watch out for the auto-linking between things and items, if you choose that option you will not find your items in the .items files; but you can deactivate it and define all items in .items files
Hope that helps

@OMR Thanks I went ahead and created a mock items file so I could use it with Smarthome Designer. Just copied the definitions under channel as you suggeste