Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

11 posts by 3 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: January 11, 2008   (RSS)

By Janet - January 5, 2008

Hey Guys - I've been reading with interest about your new CMS Builder program. I'm sure I'll have tons of questions but right now I'd like to know if I can redesign my AM1 news site using CMS Builder. The site is getting quite large and some of the features my group is requesting (the ability to start/end publishing date, the multiple editors, etc) seems to be addressed in CMS Builder. Can I dump the AM1 data files from our two established AM1 sites into one news site built from CMS Builder? (One of our news sites has over 6,000 articles in it including a couple of archives; the other is small and runs on a separate AM1 license.) without losing anything?

Jan

Re: [Janet] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By Dave - January 6, 2008

Unfortunately not, at least not yet. Article Manager 1 (and 2) still has a lot of extra features that CMS Builder doesn't.

CMS Builder doesn't have nested categories, and there isn't different access levels (writer, editor, etc) for different categories, you can grant user access to a section editor or not. Also no email notification of article changes (not sure if that was introduced in AM1 or AM2).

If you're not using those features or have other ways to make it work in CMS Builder, I could write an import script for you to move the data over. You'd want to make sure it did everything you needed first.

The way I'd recommend to move forward is to get a copy of CMS Builder and try it out, see if it looks like you can do the job with it. If you think it can, just let me know and we'll help you with the data migration, if not you can always just return it within the 90 days.

Hope that helps. Let us know if you want to go ahead with that. We would like to start creating a migration path for some of the older products. And if there's still an important feature missing, keep an eye on the releases and the newsletter because we're adding new features with every update (or even better, post your feature requests in this forum).
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By Janet - January 6, 2008

Thanks Dave.

I've had such great success with your software and I've developed such a wonderful relationship with your team that I have no doubts about trying CMS Builder.

I'll "get my feet wet", though, and try it out on a new site I'm building for our School of Ecology.

By the way, I've got a bunch of AM2 licenses I purchased last year - can I convert one or two of those to CMS Builder licenses?

Please let me take this opportunity to tell you what a pleasure it is to work with your company.

Jan

Re: [Dave] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By Janet - January 6, 2008

Great! Thanks Dave. I'm looking forward to CMS Builder. I'll stay in touch.

Jan

Re: [Dave] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By loccom - January 10, 2008



If you're not using those features or have other ways to make it work in CMS Builder, I could write an import script for you to move the data over. You'd want to make sure it did everything you needed first.



I wouldnt mind using an import script. Categories are not a problem and i am the only user. But think my news data would be good in CMSB

in CMSB on the news page, when you see the summaries does it dump them all on one page or can you stipulate how many summaries per page? and then see page 1, 2, 3 and so on?

thanks

Re: [steveo] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By Dave - January 10, 2008

There is a 'perPage' option in the list viewer page that lets you specify how many records you want displayed per page and it automatically creates prev/next page links at the bottom.

As for importing AM1, once you have CMS Builder setup the way you want let me know and I can start working on that for you. It make take few tries but I'm sure we can figure it out. Do you have many articles?
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By loccom - January 10, 2008

hi dave

I have about 200 articles on each site. I have 2 sites with AM installed.

Re: [steveo] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By Dave - January 10, 2008

Ok great, get CMS Builder setup the exactly way you want it first, create a few test articles to make sure it's right, then I'll get you to send me your artman 1 data files (/data/*.*) and your CMS Builder schema files (/data/schema/*.*) and I'll figure out to get those imported for you.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Converting AM1 to CMS Builder

By loccom - January 11, 2008

sorry dave.. I have artman2. I think the original poster had artman 1.

Would this be ok to convert? Which tables would you require?

thanks
Steve