This is a part of my series The New Features of 2sxc 7 and introduces you to importing existing data into 2sxc. You will usually want to do this when starting with existing data (like customer addresses) or when migrating from another tool (XYZ-Articles, XYZ-News, XYZ-Gallery) or from another CMS like Umbraco, Drupal etc.
The basics
There are many types of import/export in a CMS. The new feature in 2sxc is the ability to import (and export lists of a certain type of content. This sounds simple, but there are many goodies included like automatic file-mapping (so /Portal/0/xyz.jpg is turned into File:47), special handling of multi-language content, mapping to related information (so that Author can the point to another content-item containing more information about the Author).
This has been a long awaited feature and is now finally easy to use and documented. To get started...
- Read the documentation here
- Create a new content-type with the fields (columns) you need
- Export a template - it's an excel-editable XML-format which contains all the necessary metadata for re-import later
- Copy-paste your content into the excel
- Save to xml...
- and re-import :)
That's it!
Give it a Try
Go to the new Visual Query Designer - add an SQL-Module, and start playing with it!
With love from Switzerland,
Daniel
Daniel Mettler grew up in the jungles of Indonesia and is founder and CEO of 2sic internet solutions in
Switzerland and Liechtenstein, an 20-head web specialist with over 600
DNN projects since 1999. He is also chief architect of 2sxc (2SexyContent - see forge), an open source module for creating attractive content and DNN Apps.