What about import scripts ?

Advocating MODx has a lot of benefits, one of which being that users or potential users feed you with ideas and questions... some of them are pretty obvious things that you totally missed in the first place !

Today, a french Mambo user asked me if there were any import scripts to make the switch... to my knowledge, we don’t have import scripts from other CMSes...

I think we should consider having those, maybe not right now since the development is focused (rightly so) on making MODx better. But at some point we should consider it, I guess. Probably once the database sheme is stable and not deemed to change like it seems to be now (if I understand what Jason says about the new core).

What do you think ?
Should this be in the roadmap ?

I think it’s a great idea, although a daunting task indeed. Might be better to just tweak the import tool already in place and let them "auto-scrape" content delineated by certain HTML tags...

Maybe we could try to benefit from the presence of advanced users who have switched from another CMS and know the DB structure of their CMS quite well. Most of the time the import script is "simply" a collection of MySQL queries that dispatch content from the previous CMS fields to the new one...

I am not sure the current import would do the trick, or else people would have to get a static version of their websites first via Wget or something...

Anyway, I’ll give this some thought and it might be a good thing to add to the "How to contribute to MODx" page...

Davidm is right on this one --> once we get to 1.0, I will be introducing a new package installer to handle installations, upgrades, and any other data imports and exports to/from the MODx core, that can be easily extended to read data from other systems and migrate the foreign data, simply by defining field migration maps that can include custom data filters. It’ll basically be a two step process: 1- Implement a data import class for the foreign data (e.g. modImportMambo) responsible for reading the data and converting it to the new MODx import package format, then 2- import the package with the new package installer. The import class is responsible for reading the data into PHP arrays, which are then compared against a migration map, which tells the importer how to build the MODx objects from the foreign data structures. Eventually, this map could even be customizable, allowing users to define custom ways to map and filter the data into MODx through a UI.

The only thing close that I know of currently is I posted a couple of utility scripts for more advanced PHP developers to take advantage of when migrating certain kinds of PostNuke data; otherwise, it would have to be a custom endeavor pre-1.0.

Waow this concept for importing is just amazing !

I don’t know of other systems with such system... it would really be amazing to be able to define custom map to import from other applications...

Geeky stuff ! OpenGeek