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HEATWAVE alert: blog importing and exporting coming this week

The temperatures in OKC are threatening to hit triple digits this week, so the summer heat is on! If you're getting sick of these cheesy heat-related anecdotes at the beginning of all of my feature-release blog posts, then ... well ... you're not the only one!

Anyway, this week we're rolling out blog importing and exporting capabilities within our WaterCMS, SkyCMS and LightCMS systems. You'll now be able to easily import posts and comments into our system from external blogs as well as easily export all posts and comments from blogs on our system.

Easy migration and peace of mind

This functionality makes it so easy to migrate a blog from another platform onto our system. Maybe you have an external blog but you'd like to merge it into your organization's website (running on our system) to get everything running on the same domain (our recommended practice). Or, maybe you've considered moving some sites to our system but hesitated because of the manual work required to move all of those blog entries over. Well, now it's no problem to migrate with our simple, automated import functionality.

Plus, blog exporting provides you with extra peace of mind as you'll now be able to backup your entire blog to your local computer with ease. Plus, you'll know that you can always get your blog data out of our system quickly and easily if for any reason you desire to move to a different blog software. Blogs often represent a large amount of content on a website (our company blog contains far and away the majority of all content on our site), so we know that this functionality will give you some added security.

The details

For importing, we will support the WXR, BlogML, and RSS standards. Most major blog software solutions support exporting in either BlogML or WXR (the easiest two options for getting all blog data including comments). However, if your software doesn't support BlogML or WXR, it will likely generate an RSS feed, which can also be imported by our software.

For exporting, we will use the BlogML standard.

Scheduled launch and downtime

The new features are tentatively scheduled to be released on Thursday, July 24th Friday, July 25th at 8am Central Daylight Time (GMT -5). Please note that there may be up to five minutes of system down time while the new changes are rolled out. Stay tuned to our blog and to our Twitter feed for further updates.

Posted on Tue, July 22, 2008 by Tim Wall

4 comments (Add your own)

1. Scott M. wrote:
So, using the RSS feed, would it pull in content in real time? As it's posted on the source blog, it's pulled into the destination blog?

Thu, July 24, 2008 @ 3:49 PM

2. Tim Wall wrote:
Scott, great question and we anticipated that could be a point of misunderstanding since most people associate RSS feeds with continually updated content. The answer is no -- this is a one-time manual import. So, even if you are using RSS, it just grabs whatever is in the feed (or file) you provide. This is designed to be an import rather than an RSS reader element. But, the RSS reader functionality is also on the list for the future. The other downside of RSS for importing is that typically most blogs only expose a subset of their posts in the RSS feed (like the most recent 10 posts) so importing via a blog's RSS feed won't always be the most effective. They also don't typically include comments and posts together. So, the Blog ML or WXL formats are best for migrating blog content.

Thu, July 24, 2008 @ 3:55 PM

3. Catherine wrote:
It would be great if you listed a list of what common blog types are supported with these features because right now I use Livejournal and Blogger and would love to know if both of these are supported in non-rss format.

Tue, September 16, 2008 @ 2:22 PM

4. Tim Wall wrote:
@Catherine, we did list a few of the tools supported by each format on our release post, which came a few days after this post. Here is the URL. You can check that out and if you still have questions, let us know. http://www.elementfusion.com/heatwave-alert-blog-import-export-and-a-few-other-goodies

Tue, September 16, 2008 @ 4:21 PM

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