Thread

Hi,
We are running ExpressionEngine 2.4.0 with Multiple Site Manager. We had 9 sites in here and added a 10th yesterday. We need to import a site that was built elsewhere in a standalone instance of ExpressionEngine and have been given the files and an SQL dump of the database.

I noticed that I couldn’t import the SQL dump into our database because many of the ID’s and column names in the dump would overwrite data on the installation with 10 sites. For example the dump has columns in ‘exp_channel_data’ such as ‘field_id_1’ up to ‘field_id_40’ which already exist in the other DB.

I understand that EE with MSM is not capable of running websites from different MySQL databases, so what are my options here? Surely it should not be so difficult to move an EE website into EE?

I would appreciate any help or guidance on this.

Regards,
Andy

MSM has never had any export/import abilities.  Getting a site out is doable only by copying the entire install & deleting off everything you don’t want.  Moving a site in would involve looking at all tables involved and - as you’ve noticed - figuring out how to extend the MSM site to accomodate the new site, translating & mapping all fields involved.

It’s not what you want to hear, but honestly the best approach (if indeed this new site absolutely needs to run in the MSM install) is to manually re-create it.

Levi Graham just announced http://ee-garage.com/nsm-site-generator at EECI, but it’s unclear whether it will work with MSM.

Hey Ŧom,

I do not have a whole lot to add to what Mike has said.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

Cheers,

Hi,
Thanks both for your replies.

We really just needed to know whether or not this was possible, so you’ve given us all the information we need.

It would be very useful if there was a method to import content from other EE sites, but after examining the table structures in the database I can see why this would be difficult to achieve. Having to recreate websites just to move them between instances of EE can involve a lot of (repeated) work. I guess it’s ok for small sites but if you have several hundred pages, custom fields, etc then it’s a lot of work to do this!

Thanks anyway.

Hey Ŧom,

I am glad that Mike was able to help!

If you need anything else, please just let me know by opening a new thread.

Cheers,