Can we find a mentor to help us with site import?

[Graham Atherton]

We are moving our large website at www.aspergillus.org.uk to drupal. After some very steep learning curves we seem to be largely successful with data import with one exception: importing images from url's in a csv file (each record comes complete with alt & title & notes along with dimensions in many cases). We are using feeds module so far and it seems to have limitations we want to avoid. A major case in point is that all of our images were nicely organised in files but feeds seems to want to place them all in one public file unless we take the trouble to create multiple content types each with a distinct subfolder as destination.

Has anyone any experience of this?

Some help standing by for our many smaller issues - possibly telling us where we could get local help - would be most appreciated and an endorsement of the power of the Drupal community!

Thanks

Graham Atherton

[Elliot Ward]

Hi,

I can't guide you using feeds module for this specific problem, but would recommend that you look at the migrate module for this task instead, especially if you have access to the source database and filesystem.

http://drupal.org/migrate

There's a talk I gave about migrate and how to practically start using it with video here: http://vimeo.com/54448150 and slides here: http://prezi.com/d_dfvikmgo8h/get-your-bits-in/

Regards,

Eli

Graham Atherton

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[Philip Norton]

I have used feeds quite a bit, to the point where I created around 16,000 nodes based on a single uploaded file. Each node had geolocation (provided by the location module) and a complex set of permissions based on groups and taxonomy tags. The permissions approach was why we used Feeds. The final idea was that we would then pass on the responsibility to our users to upload small amounts of data to update/insert nodes. A requirement was that users could update just any old node using this method, they had to be validated to do it.

I even submitted a patch to the Feeds module to allow for CSV files to be uploaded as private files.

You are probably on the right line with the files, you just need to intercept the data as the Feeds module and ensure that the right file is references for the right node.

However, if you are doing a one-time import into a new site then Eli is correct in that Migrate is the way to go.

Thanks,

Phil

[pixel8]

Hi Graham,

What you need to do if you are using the feeds module is add a few more to the pot:

FileField Sources

File (Field) Paths

Filefield sources allows you to specify external URLs as the source for the image fields and this works for feeds too. This will allow feeds to use the URL for the image in the CSV file to pull the image in to the files directory of the website. On top of that filefield paths allows you to on a field per field and content type basis to specify the path that the files end up when they are added and therefore imported.

Better still fieldfield paths can accept tokens so that folders can be created programatically :)

I used this to transfer all the content from a Drupal 6 website to a Drupal 7 version of it by creating RSS feeds of the content on the D6 version and pulling them in using the Feeds and Xpath Parser but this will also work for CSV files too.

If you need a hand setting this all up let me know!