Bulk Import to Expression Engine

Question

I'm a software developer but I don't specialise in PHP and have had no real prior experience with Expression Engine. A friend of mine who runs an estate agents has had a new website built in EE, but the people doing it are more front-end/graphic design experienced and were unable to implement one bit of much-needed functionality - automatically importing properties to the site.

Specifically, they have some property management software that will export a file in RightMove BLM (v3) format containing details of all the properties, along with associated images for each property, to an FTP server. There is a CodeIgniter module available to parse this format (http://biostall.com/codeigniter-rightmove-blm-parser-library), and it is also specified on the RightMove website. They would want some process to look at these files and do a full refresh of their Lettings channel within EE.

Is it possible to achieve this with EE? My initial thought was to write a standalone script to do the importing, but I don't know how to use the EE API from 'outside' EE.

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Answer 1

There are a couple of add-ons for importing data that you could look at. I imagine you'd need some further customization though to scoop up that format.

https://solspace.com/software/expressionengine/importer/

http://brandnewbox.co.uk/products/details/datagrab

Answer 2

It's very possible, I'm doing something similar with a UK jobs board (Broadbean) which POSTs XML and populates an ExpressionEngine channel. It even accepts an update (has it seen this ID before) and will update the entry.

In my case I didn't create an ExpressionEngine Module but rather a script that would accept the POSTed feed from an authenticated user, purely as it meant it was one less thing to update or worry about when EE changed and I wanted it to be fire and forget.

Hope that puts your mind at rest.

John