Import Content From External Sources

Prerequisites

• Contact Support to enable
  • the External Content Importer feature on your site
  • Media Manager
• The External Content Importer is accessible via the UI by {expert-url}/Special:ImportExport. Note, that if you see "You do not have permission to view this page" then Contact Support to enable the Import/Export UI on your site. 
• You should see the tab called "External Content Import":

Limitations

The External Content Importer requires a zip file that can include:

• HTML (.html) files containing article content
  • Inline styling within an HTML file will not be imported. 
• Media can be imported if they are supported file types 
  • Media Manager does not support collections larger than 10,000 files. 
• Markdown (.md) is not a supported file type 

Import Content

1. Navigate to {expert-url}/Special:ImportExport
2. Choose a zip file to import 
3. Provide an email address (if none is provided, the configured admin email address will be used) that will be used to send the following: 
   1. Job success/failures
   2. Mapping file: Shows each relative path from the import file and where those pages can be found in the expert site, broken links, and missing images
   3. Unreferenced media file
4. Source domain of external content. This value is used for mapping absolute links. If no source domain is provided, all absolute links will be treated as external links. External links are imported as-is which may cause links to break
   1. Ex: If you are importing content from a site called www.foo.com, we will map every reference of www.foo.com -> {expert-url} to ensure internal linking remains functional
5. Choose if you want your imported content to be imported as Public or Private. Semi-Public and Semi-Private options are not available at this time.
6. Choose if you want to import unreferenced media
   1. Media can either be explicitly referenced on an html page or it can be attached to a page. The only way to ensure media will import to an Expert page is to explicitly reference it through HTML. Any media found in the zip file that is not explicitly referenced on any page HTML can optionally be imported to Media Manager to enable quick attachment to articles in the future. If you choose to import unreference media, you will receive an email with the list of all unreferenced media to make future attaching easier.
7. Choose if you want to test the import 
   1. A test import is a good way to understand how your pages will be mapped, and to identify unreferenced media before actually importing the content into your Expert site

Where does the content go?

Externally imported content is imported following GCF in a placeholder Category called "Content Import". Guides that house the imported articles are dynamically created depending on the size of the import. Each guide can hold 800 articles. The guides that are created are named "Guide 1-n" where n = ciel((number of .html files in zip) / 800). 

Example: For a zip file containing 2500 html files, there will be 4 guides created named "Guide 1", "Guide 2", "Guide 3", "Guide 4"

Note that each unique import will create a new guide(s). 

Validation

It is imporant to review your imported content to ensure everything looks as expected. Review the imported guide to ensure there is no unexpected missing media, that all links are functioning as expected, and your content is correct. All articles are imported with a tag "unvalidated". All unvalidated articles will display in the section called "Imported Articles needing Validation":

To make the validation process easier, at the bottom of this container, there is a button "Quick Validate" that can be used to navigate through the imported articles in an overlay.

Functions of the Quick Validator:

• Back/Next toggles through the list of unvalidated articles
• Edit creates a draft article of the page
• Open article to open this article in a new tab
• Validate to remove the unvalidated tag from the article, and move the article to the list of "Validated Articles" at the bottom of the guide
• Any pages with broken links will have the Broken Link display at the bottom right hand corner