Best Practices for Importing Content

Hello all,

I’ve been lurking for a while, but I think that I’ve now got my hands dirty enough with EE, I’m going to post with a question regarding add-on development.

We have a legacy CMS which has tens of thousands of content rows we’d like to import into EE. I’d prefer not to do a direct DB->DB import of the data (MSSQL->MySQL). Ideally, we’d leverage EE’s API to add channel entries for each content type - formatting the content as it comes out of the DB and passing it to the API so it maps to the correct field types and configurations.

Here’s where I’m stuck: should this be developed as an Extension, a Module, an Accessory, a Plugin, or none of the above?

I know (at a base level): 1) Plugins are used to enhance/change the output of templates 2) Extensions allow developers to utilize hooks and “extend” EE’s functionality. 3) Accessories are usually suited for displaying information in the admin panel 4) Modules are the most complex of add-ons

Sounds like developing a module (with necessary tabs) would be the way to go; I could display the status of the import or allow users to select what content to import (via form fields) but I can’t help but think we could do it simpler by writing our own custom controller to handle the job.

Environment details: Win 2003 IIS 6 PHP 5.3.3 32bit NTS MySQL 5.1.51

At a minimum, how would you import content from a legacy system?