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Are there any add-ons (or tricks) that allow the exporting/importing of channel entries between EE installs? I know there are a couple options for exporting/importing channel settings and fields, but what about the data?

Maybe using a pair of add-on to export/import XML/JSON is the best choice? Any success here?

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  • Matt, did any of the answers help you? If yes, please mark the answer correct by clicking on the checkmark to the left of the answer.
    – Anna_MediaGirl ♦
    Dec 22, 2012 at 6:22

3 Answers 3

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The way I generally go about it is to create one RSS template per channel exporting the entries I want with all their custom fields (remember to specify a hight limit parameter if you have more than 100 entries). I then use DataGrab and point to that template to import these entries into my new site.

You might have small MySQL tasks to perform after that, like mapping the old upload locations to the new ones, etc but the import process is quite smooth.

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    It surprises me that this is the best solution to a seemingly simple task... has nobody written a plugin for this specific (and very useful) function?
    – John Hunt
    Jul 10, 2014 at 9:54
  • Datagrab is the plugin in question. You still have to export your entries as XML/RSS. Writing templates is the quickest way to go about it IMHO.
    – Jérôme Coupé
    Jul 10, 2014 at 12:08
  • Hmm, well I've been having a look at the core of EE.. it's not pretty - getting basic channel data out isn't too bad but when you include grid and relationship fields it gets a little out of hand!
    – John Hunt
    Jul 10, 2014 at 15:55
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I recently had the task of bringing over a thousand or so entries into a complete redesign. It was a lot of writing custom queries for MySQL, exporting them out as either CSV or XML (we needed to keep some HTML in entries with a WYSIWYG field type), then using Datagrab to import everything into the new site

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  • Yes, I've been looking into the structure of the EE database.. it's not simple when you hit the relationship fields! Haha.
    – John Hunt
    Jul 11, 2014 at 12:49
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I recently used Solspace's Importer add-on as part of my upgrade from EE 1 to EE 2 in order to bring over my EE 1 Galleries. For the exporting, I setup a template formatted to output each entry as a csv entry.

It took a good deal of trial and error to make sure all the elements were being both exported and imported correctly, but its definitely a viable approach. This included handling Tags, though I don't believe the Importer handles any data stored outside of EE's standard tables.

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  • when you say "Galleries", are you referring to images? I need to be able to import images form an external source and associate them to a particular Channel (in a Matrix field).
    – ExpressionEngineNewbie
    Feb 14, 2013 at 22:41

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