BlogCFC Export/Import Code

I'm now in the export/import business. Well, kinda. If you use BlogCFC and need a tool to export/import your blog entries, download the attachment below. This was tested with the latest 5.9 build of blogcfc. It outputs to WDDX files in a specified folder. You can then use the import comment to read in those WDDX files to a new BlogCFC instance. This may become an official BlogCFC tool for V6, but for now it is an unsupported utility.

A big thank you to digital primates. They needed the tool and paid me to development, then said they were cool with me giving it to the world.

Comments (10) Download Nov 30, 2007 8:47 AM Views: 2714

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Daniel Greenfeld's Gravatar How about a JSON import/export? CF8 supports it nicely, and so does... ahem... the rest of the world. Using it instead of WDDX would mean that people could more easily import from other languages into blogCFC.
# Posted By Daniel Greenfeld | 11/30/07 8:56 AM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar BlogCFC is supported on CF6 and 7 though. I could have included the nice JSON CFC I use for Lighthouse Pro, but I wanted a super simple set of scripts.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 11/30/07 8:57 AM
James Buckingham's Gravatar Bit of a sideline to that subject - I actually wrote a tool to automate the export of my Blogspot blog into BlogCFC :-). It wasn't bullet-proof because the layouts were slightly out afetr but in terms of the server-side it saved me so much time!

I don't know if that's something that would interest you Raymond?
# Posted By James Buckingham | 11/30/07 9:44 AM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar Not sure - but send it and I can share it on blogcfc.com.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 11/30/07 11:40 AM
Adam Tuttle's Gravatar Can you share a WSDL or otherwise explain the format of the import data? I'd like to write a script that converts wordpress export data into blogcfc import data, and I don't yet have a copy of blogcfc running to fill with dummy data and then export to figure it out manually.
# Posted By Adam Tuttle | 11/30/07 2:04 PM
Adam Tuttle's Gravatar I don't know why I said WSDL. I meant XSD. At least I think I did... unless this is just another brain fart.
# Posted By Adam Tuttle | 11/30/07 2:05 PM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar The data is WDDX. It's part of ColdFusion. CF can both serialize and deserialize it natively.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 11/30/07 2:08 PM
Adam Tuttle's Gravatar I understand that, but in order for me to translate the data I export from WordPress (a blog app written in PHP), I need to know what the data elements are and how to structure them.
# Posted By Adam Tuttle | 11/30/07 2:11 PM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar Oh - um - well, all I did was serialize the data from my blogcfc tables. You could make a blank blogcfc install and serialize them.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 11/30/07 2:13 PM
Roger Skalbeck's Gravatar The export/import works well with one note of caution for anybody using it to merge blogs: Be careful with user tables & avoid duplication at all cost. After creating a new blog on our development server, I exported it and tried to import to merge it with an existing blog with a different config directory. Yikes! I ended up duplicating users, which duplicated display for all blog entries, even though the actual entries table was correct.

After rolling back the database and manually changing the WDDX file for user names, I imported the same files again and all is right with the world. Thanks Ray (and digital primates). This was a great help.
# Posted By Roger Skalbeck | 1/3/08 2:10 PM
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