I really tried to write a Developer Blog entry last week before I left for my long weekend vacation, but I seemed to have failed to find an interesting enough topic. I really do not have one for this week either (notice how I am writing this entry on Friday afternoon), but I figured a few of you actually prefer when I ramble on about nothing in particular. Here goes…
One thing that has confused me is that not a single third party developer has released a module for member importing and exporting. While not the easiest problem to solve in ExpressionEngine, it would rank up there as one of the most useful things for people doing contract work on ExpressionEngine sites. Am I missing something? Is there one out there I have simply not seen or you guys are hiding? A confused CTO would like to know the answer, so if you could help me out here, please.
I’m more of a hack than a module writer. I find it easier to work with a simple csv file that I take apart and write the code to import by hand.
If I was a better coder, I would have written something.
Honestly, I haven’t found the need to do so just yet. At least no one has approached me with anything. (of course that doesn’t mean much.)
But I’ve already made a super small plug-in that displays any member field data depending on whatever member id you pass it, so that’s really all i needed personally.
One thing that has confused me is that not a single third party developer has released a module for member importing and exporting. While not the easiest problem to solve in ExpressionEngine, it would rank up there as one of the most useful things for people doing contract work on ExpressionEngine sites. Am I missing something? Is there one out there I have simply not seen or you guys are hiding? A confused CTO would like to know the answer, so if you could help me out here, please.
Doesn’t this kind of go along with the same problems of creating conversion system for the forums? Wouldn’t you need to create a different module for each different system that you are importing members from?
BTW I had created a html front end to illustrate how I thought that an import module for weblogs could work. You can see it here. And yes, I am willing to pay for the development of such a module.
MF, pentry_id is for the pMachine post_id used during the conversion process. I use it for referring back to other system’s unique identifiers. It’s not used by EE except for mapping pMachine URLs.
A module for import/export of weblogs, weblog entries, field groups, category groups, member groups, and almost everything else in EE (you name it) does exist.
I call it EEO Manager.. as in i/o, you know.. input/output for EE.. nifty eh?
I have been surprised, that no developer came up with an import module for weblogs yet. I’ve been needing this for ages.
Wordpress has an option to import using an RSS feed. I have not extensively tested the feature, but the process worked fine for migrating a small blog from EE to Wordpress.
Before I get lynched, I will explain. I had a WOW guild setup on EE core, but they wanted me to customize the website and add a forum. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time on an unpaid project, so I setup Wordpress and PHPBB with matching themes (Mike Lothar has a number of matching themes available.)
You guys are still not answering the question of what to do with exported data. If you do not export that data in a format that another system can use, then an export module would be pointless.
Manually exporting members is trivially easy. I know the process is easy because I have created a script to do so, and I am not a programmer (the scripts are little more than MySQL queries at this point.) I have successfully used the script to move PHPBB members into EE. I am currently working on a script to import the rest of the PHPBB data, but this process is much more difficult. I intent to create a module from the scripts I have been writing, but the module will only address conversion between EE and PHPBB.
Given a data dump, I could manually insert information into the database because I know how to do so. A user without this knowledge would not be able to use a raw data dump. There is no standard form for data to be moved between systems, unless you guys have MoveableType in mind.
BTW I had created a html front end to illustrate how I thought that an import module for weblogs could work.
I often need to import data from a database that isn’t EE related. This post caught my interest as it could also be used for doing this. I have for example a database now that I need to import into EE for a client, but all the fields are unrelated. I can produce a csv or xml file.
A commented version of my Perl script that I used to bulk import 3,000 weblog entries into my Expression Engine weblog/CMS tool.
I’m using a weblog to hold more than 3k photos that I’m offering for sale to participants in a rodeo that I shot. There was no way I was going to manually add thousands of entries. So like any good geek, I scripted it. I’ve posted my script along with copious comments. Please keep in mind that this script worked for me. I’m sure there is a better way to do this. USE THIS SCRIPT AT YOUR OWN RISK. I’m posting it as an example and tutorial rather than a “run it as is” tool.
I still don’t see how any of this would really be useful. If you know anything at all about development then you don’t need this stuff.
For instance, any PHP novice can write a script to transfer data directly from one database to another in the matter of minutes. PHP is beautiful for making things KISS. The only component that really takes any time is mapping the data from one database to the other. For example, with my project, moving users is easy, but moving all of the forum data is a real pain. The forum data is much more complex than the user data.
At the other end is the user who knows nothing about PHP or MySQL, or does not have the time to mess with it. This person would need a push-button solution. The only way to create a push-button solution is a tailored made script that will not work for anything else.
From what I have seen here, you guys are talking about tools made by developers that are to be used by other developers. As a developer, all I would really need to know is where the information is located in the database.
I think my script for moving users from PHPBB to EE is less than 10 lines of code. I would not even need a module to do that with. So Paul, I am confused also, but for a different reason. Again, people doing contract work probably wouldn’t need such a module that I can see.
I’d be more than interested in being able to import members from Invision Power Board to EE.
Also being able to import forum topics from Invision would of course be wonderful…
