Posted by colinafoley on December 2, 2011 at 3:51pm
I'm about to take a look at the Feeds module for importing some content. I think Nate said he used it before or was going to look at it in the future? Let me know if anyone has any tips about the module or if they want to know anything specific about it. I'll post some feedback about the module if I have any.
Comments
re: feeds
Yeah, Nate's your man for that. He's been doing a lot with the Feeds and Migrate modules.
Yes, I've used it
... and I love it! In particular, I enjoy it in combination with Feeds XPath Parser (http://drupal.org/project/feeds_xpathparser) and Feeds Tamper (http://drupal.org/project/feeds_tamper). I've also used it to import CSV data that was originally collected in a Google spreadsheet.
One thing that can really help out - be sure to set one (or more) of your fields as being a GUID. That way, you can specify that the imports can update existing content. It will match up the data based on that GUID and update any changes that have been made in the external source. If your use case includes anything beyond just a 1-time snapshot import, this can be incredibly useful.
Just this week I've been investigating the Migrate module as well for data import. That looks to be much more powerful, but a lot more complicated and not very well documented. If you know your data can be made reliable available via XML or CSV and it's not very complicated, I'd definitely recommend Feeds.
Do you have any experience with Migrate? I'd love to swap knowledge if you do!
Any input on feeds?
I don't know if this is the right place to post... (relatively new at Drupal), but I noticed that you've gotten Feeds to work. As I was configuring it, I was exclaiming to myself how awesome this module is... until I got to the end, when I never got the import to actually work. I already posted here -- http://drupal.org/node/1623292 -- in the forums about it, so I'll let that explain the situation. I feel like I must be missing something that is obvious..... I hope it's that simple, anyways!
About your comment about the GUID -- the data I'm importing doesn't have any unique ID. Could that be a cause for concern? Actually, I just now tried adding a unique ID to my test CSV and nothing changed.
Any input would be welcomed!
Any input on feeds?
Relish27,
Funny you should ask. I JUST got mine working on Tuesday and have managed to replicate success about 3-4 times by now. I'm in the process of writing up how to do it. However, the sites "transmitting" the data are also under my control, so I had a slight advantage of configuring that data the way I wanted to.
The biggest PITA I found out was I needed to create a content type (in my case called Calender Importer). In the BASIC SETTINGS section of the feed importer, set the "Attach to content type" dropdown to THIS NEW content type. Then in PROCESSOR section of feed importer, set Content Type drop down to the content type you want your incoming data to take the form of. Finally, go to content and add a content of the new importer type. When you do, that node will now have a field for a URL. Put the URL of the feed you want to read from here. Then visit the content type itself; you'll see multiple tabs including IMPORT. Select the import tab and then click the import button and (with luck) it will import the data you want from the feed and use it to create the content type you selected in PROCESSOR.
Hope this helps.