Content Transfer Improvements Part 1: Importing Releases
April 24, 2012 by Alana DysonWe've been working towards a better way to import your archived content, which we call the content transfer process. Our goal is to have a process that can transfer massive amounts of content so your workload is less. As a content transfer specialist at PrestoSports, I've worked with many clients to move their data, and I understand how this process could be easier.
This first blog in a three-part series will give you tips on how to add meta tags and use ZIP files to bulk upload releases into your site. The second blog will talk about how you can bulk import bios. Our last blog will explain how you can embed images directly into your HTML.
If you're transferring to PrestoSports from another provider, share this post with your webmaster or IT department or whoever is helping you transfer your archived content. We've had to build a suite of tools for all of the sites we've brought over from other providers because each are exporting their own dump formats, and by utilizing these tips, IT departments will have the ability to transfer more complete archived content onto their new PrestoSports websites.
Using HTML to import releases
You've always been able to upload HTML into our system, and it will show up looking great with your standard navigation and site design, but we've made a number of improvements to let you import more information about your releases.
We do this by looking at the <head> part of your HTML document. The HTML <title> tag will get taken out and saved as the title in our content management system. We've gradually been adding other fields that you can set in a similar manner, including the publish date, the lead-in, and the thumbnail image. Finally, we've added a special content type called "article/rich" that will allow you to edit your release with our nice editor instead of having to see the raw HTML. This makes it easier to edit or copy and paste out of your archived releases.
The following meta tags should be added to your articles to allow for easy bulk importation into our system:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="article/rich">
<title>TITLE</title>
<meta name="description" content="LEADIN" />
<meta name="pubdate" content="DATE MM/dd/yyyy" />
<meta name="page.alias" content="PREVIOUS PATH URL" />
</head>
<body>
The HTML for your article
</body>
</html>
Adding an image as a thumbnail in the release
To add have an image show in the body of your release please follow the below steps:
1. Conver the image to a base64 encode
2. Create a div element with the appropriate properties
3. Inside the div element, place the img tag with thumbnail property and the generated base64 string
Here is an example screen shot: http://screencast.com/t/OpdcBUxzB
Create a ZIP file to upload thousands of releases at
once
You can always upload individual files or drag-n-drop your HTML with meta tags into our system, but our system also allows ZIP files to be uploaded directly into your site. There are some tips we want to share to make sure you get the best result.
The most important part of using ZIP files is to have the paths in your ZIP file match the path of our system.
For example, if you wanted to import releases for all men's basketball releases from 2011-12, be sure to title the ZIP files /sports/mbkb/2011-12/releases/ and import the ZIP file in the root section.
This way, when you import the releases, they will automatically be imported into the correct section of the site.
With the improved release importer tool, bulk amounts of releases can now be imported with the guarantee that all of the data from the original release will successfully transfer.