What They’re Saying About EE
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
#eecms sucks at exporting entries. Luckily @wordpress is amazing at importing them. I’ll never use expressionengine again. Good riddance
Kyle Tress via Twitter
Would I like to see ExpressionEngine be able to export entries into formats that other systems can slurp in? Yes. But because of the flexibility of EE templates, you can export to almost anything if you’re willing to dig in and make it work. Even to that specialized WordPress XML format that WordPress exports and imports.
I don’t think EE sucks at exporting entries (but good on you for not saying software sucks anonymously) it just might take a little work. Flexibility comes at a cost but it’s usually worth it.
To the readers: What have your experiences been exporting from ExpressionEngine?
Posted on Jul 27, 2011 by Ryan Irelan
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Matt Weinberg — 15:16 on 07.27.2011
We’ve had very little problem doing exports. As mentioned, the templates let you do whatever you want. That means we’ve made templates/actions to do JSON exports, XML, CSV, etc…
seth — 16:05 on 07.27.2011
Expression Engine is as advanced as the user. That makes it great but also very frustrating at times. No crutches.
GDmac — 05:11 on 07.28.2011
Yes, exporting is as easy as surrounding your channel:entries tag with the tags, info, annotation that you need / want / wish.
On the other hand, lets talk about importing…
Grover Saunders — 10:05 on 07.28.2011
Heck, I’d be happy if you could just export entries in a format EE can “slurp in.” Unless something changed recently, there’s no way to import the data back in to EE2, so it really doesn’t matter what you can do with the templates in terms of exporting. And even if you could, having to hand-build custom export templates for each channel/blog might be easy, but if the site uses even a modest amount of custom fields, it is a lot of tedious work no matter how advanced you are. And after all, the whole point of using a pre-built CMS like EE is to automate the more repetitive tasks associated with building a database driven website.
Let’s be clear
Matt Weinberg — 10:06 on 07.28.2011
I agree. It’s easier these days in EE2 using the Channel Entries API, whereas in EE1 you had to write raw queries, but it’s still difficult—especially when you get into relationships, etc…
Derek Hogue — 10:27 on 07.28.2011
The fact that there is no built-in way (i.e., via the control panel) of importing entries in EE2 is a serious oversight. I used EE1’s MT import dozens of times, mostly importing from WordPress sites, and sometimes from custom PHP sites. Now I have to buy DataGrab and use the experimental MT import, which doesn’t always work so well.
EllisLab would do well to write an excellent WordPress importer at the very least, to make it less painful to migrate over.