Posted by priestdi on March 10, 2011 at 10:14pm
We're building a new website for a college newspaper, which now is hosted on College Publisher.
We just found out that we'll have a two-week window to grab the archived stories. We're told it will be a CSV file, via an FTP server.
Any ideas about what to do with them, once we have them?
The journalism teacher really wants them as part of the new site.
thanks for all your help.
Diane
Comments
Play with the node import module
It's pretty nifty, actually, and is designed to bring CSV files into Drupal and turn their rows into nodes.
thanks ... then do we use
thanks ... then do we use some sort of search engine to make them usable for readers/staff?
trying to visualize this, with mixed results, hah.
What to do once you import them
One of the cool things about node import is that it will bring the content in as full-fledged Drupal nodes. So they'll be stories just like the new stuff you post.
If you want to treat them differently from your new content, you might want to create a new content type (oh, call it "archive" or "really old stuff" or something) with different default settings (say, no commenting allowed, since the only people who tend to comment on old stuff are spammers).
So assuming the import works (there are a lot of knobs and buttons you can fiddle with), you'll now have a ton of articles in your database. Then it becomes a question of using Views to figure out how to display it all to users and to external search engines (the built-in Drupal search engine will start indexing the stuff on your site's next cron run).
The one thing node import won't do by itself is put the content into any sort of taxonomy. If that's important to you, there are a couple of options. If you're a masochist, open the CSV file and create a new column called, oh, "category" and tag the rows by hand. Then, when you get to the part of the import where you're asked to map column names to Drupal fields, you can have those terms imported into your taxonomy. Or see if something like Calais, which attempts to figure out what a node is about without human intervention, would work for you.