Tips, Tricks, How-to's, and News for QuantumCMS Users
Page Export/Import Feature
If I find myself working on our QCMS development site and muck things up after making numerous changes during the course of several weeks then decide I want to revert everything to mirror our production site, it would be nice to be able to go to the production site, export page 1, and then import that page into the development site--repeat as required to restore our development site to its pre-mucked condition. Since we are dealing with what would be the reproduction of data base records rather than merely copying plain text from one location to another, it's obvious that we cannot simply copy and paste the desired data (to and from a Windows clipboard for example), but the data should be exportable to file(s).xyz from one data base, which then could be imported into another data base. Perhaps with some clever programming, this could be made to appear relatively similar to (although not precisely the same as) a copy-and-paste feature to an end user. What do you think?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Bill Stewart on -
Thanks for the thoughts Eugene. There are a couple features in 4.1 already that might help with this.
One item of note is that in version 4.1 reverting to older versions of a page has become much easier, including the ability to view the older versions in the full look and feel of your site. You can find more information on the History feature in this tutorial for using Page History.
A new feature in 4.1 is the ability to create Drafts of a page's content. This allows you to muck around with the content of a page for as long as you like without actually changing the content that is rendered for that page to your site visitors. You can take a look at our tutorial for Drafts for some more information.
As a more general feature, for replicating content from a production environment to a development environment for enterprise clients, such as yourself, I can also see the usefulness. Would you expect that functionality to copy just the page content or our would you also expect it to bring all of the subordinate details, such as page properties, linked pages, etc?
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Permalink Reply by Eugene Colucci on -
"Would you expect that functionality to copy just the page content or our would you also expect it to bring all of the subordinate details, such as page properties, linked pages, etc?"
If by "page properties" you mean copy all the information under each of the Page X tabs--Details, Content, Marketing, and Child Pages, I would want everything visible in the Details tab to copy as well as everything in the Content and Marketing tabs. As for copying content under the Child Pages tab as well as the Child Pages themselves, having an option to copy or not copy the Child Pages would be ideal. I realize the code for such a feature can be daunting, but it would be nice and often useful since copying the entire data base simply is not feasible.
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Permalink Reply by Bill Stewart on
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If by "page properties" you mean copy all the information under each of the Page X tabs--Details, Content, Marketing, and Child Pages...
I was referring to the various related information that can be found under the Properties menu when editing a Page. Properties, XML Documents, Aliases, Linked Pages, Descriptions, etc. But as you note, it would probably make the most sense to make them all available as part of the feature and allow the user to enable or disable the exact items they would want to bring over.
Thank you for your feed back Eugene. We'll add this idea to the pile and give it some consideration.
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