By RwDwR on

I am moving from my very own developed cms to drupal because Drupal is structured in quite the same way as my cms is. However Drupal caught up with me because it is being developed by a lot more people and the modules can be made by anybody. Great advantage there :)

My problem lies with moving from my own e-commerce package to Drupals. I have about 2150 articles/categories stored in my database. But I have no clue as to how I can get them into drupal efficiently without having to re-type each and every one of them (would take about 36 hours I think to do). I can export into any format needed, incuding an xml format which I already have.

Is there any module or quick way to import the articles or do I have to look at the php code and figure out either how to make such an import module of (very basic) figure out which queries I need to do to get the info into my drupal database?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

Although it may feel a bit backward to go via static files, if you can output a nice clean semantic dump of your site (eg by hiding your Navigations and running WGET) you may find that import_html will do the rest of the job. It works on XML natively. A dialect of XML called semantic XHTML in fact. You can, if you feel bold, even create an XSL to get from your custom XML to an import structure.
You can structure your page elements, menu, URLs and tags too, if you have any.
Set up a CCK version of your element fields first, then map them across by setting class names to the divs you dump. Either in your dump, or in your custom XSL import template.

import/export module will import from CSV, but not much else very well. However if you are game, you can look at the way it does so, then create your own import script.
Important, USE THE DRUPAL API to create the nodes, don't think you can do it via MYSQL or things will break.

I've done a total conversion by cleaning and importing an old custom CMS into a temp table, then running a custom import script. It was only about 2 pages long in the end.

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards