Hello everyone, I am a non-programmer recently installed Backdrop CMS, with no drupal experience.
I want to mass-import 700 posts on our site (very old, not works in major software) into Backdrop site, so I installed the Feed module and tried importing few posts with CSV created according to the sample template.
In the sample template, I could see only 5 columns; guid, title, body, tags, published. I created some custom fields for importing our old posts such as "Date of meeting", "Promoter", "Participants", how should I add the column of the value for those custom fields in CSV? Is it possible?
In addition, after the test import, I found the author of the post was displayed as Anonymous and the URL alias was like "node/123". Is there any solution to put them specific value with CSV beforehand?
Thanks,
Comments
@TinyTiger13 - Are you importing from a Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site? If so, there is an upgrade process which will handle the situation you are describing.
https://docs.backdropcms.org/documentation/upgrading-from-drupal-7
You post suggests that this might not be the case and that you have the data in csv file already. If that is the case, Feeds is probably your best option for importing the data, however feeds assumes that the necessary fields already exist in your new site and you just need to map the old fields to the new ones.
The first step in importing this data with feeds will be to create the new fields in Backdrop before you do the import, which should be relatively easy.
https://backdropcms.org/user-guide/fields
Here is a video on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7DNBr6d_h8
In terms of the author field, I see two choices. In Backdrop, the author of a post usually refers to a user account in the system. If I were importing from Drupal 7, I would first import the users (including the UID - unique identifier) then when you import the posts with an author UID, Backdrop will match the author UID with the correct user account.
If you do not want or need to create the user accounts and would prefer to simply add the author data to the posts through the CSV file, then you could just manually create custom fields on posts for the author that do not connect to a user account. This would work best if the site primarily an archive and you won't be adding new content.
If you are adding new content and especially new users, this might not work well because the author data on the new content will be user accounts while the author data for old posts is stored in a completely different field (you could work around this problem, but it requires more detailed knowledge of Backdrop).
The best solution would be to create user accounts for all of your post authors before importing the post data and use the author field to map the UID to the appropriate user account
I hope that this is helpful. Please, feel free to post additional questions.
Thanks for your reply @stpaultim.
With the information you gave me, I found that I can add columns to import using "Structure > Feed Importers".
The issue about the author registered as Anonymous was also solved with the Feed Importers.
Thank you very much for your help!