How automatic content import can save you time and money

Ever needed to grab a big amount of data or content from an external source?

When building a website you might have to enter a huge amount of content coming from other sources. Sometimes the contents to be entered are from another web, sometimes from several, sometimes in text files, or a database, sometimes you have to write them in full, maybe they are in XML format.

These data can be short or long texts, numbers, or even mountains of numbers, dates, names, postal addresses or geographical coordinates, images, or multimedia files of various types, and so on. Importing those contents manually might bring to website administrators some real challenges.

Case study: E-commerce products upload

Imagine an administrator has to import 1000 products for his e-commerce website. So the task for the unlucky administrator is to copy every description, price and images. He needs to repeat surfing the source page, opening products, downloading images to import them into the website, copying description and price and so on until the last 1000th post. Boring right?

We are currently working with an e-commerce store where we have automated all products upload from their suppliers XML files.

What does it mean? They don’t have to lift a finger and new products, updated stock, changes to their images, prices – the whole lot – is automatically updated for them. Now, let’s go grab that drink and watch the products being uploaded automatically.

Case study: Research publications sync

The George Institute, one of our not-for-profit clients, needed to automatically import and sync research publications inside their Drupal 7 application running Biblio, a publications repository module. We are talking about thousands of publications.

We have created a Drupal custom module to fetch only the publications from researchers affiliated with UNSW, filtered by type and fetched fields depending on the type of publications.

This import runs automatically every night at 3 am, making it a breeze for admin to login in the morning and see all the new publications imported.

How can we help you?

What’s your challenge with data import? It might be a site migration or a social media feed. All those challenges can be solved via automatic content import. There would be no more boringness, incorrect data, time and money waste. Computers will take care of what should be done by them. They will stay awake 24/7 and get the job done perfectly!