Frequently asked questions

Importing data

Questions relating to importing data from existing websites or bulk importing new data from Excel or .csv files.

If your data is in our standard formats or you can rearrange your data so that it is in one of our standard formats then you can submit it to us and we can import it for free.

If it is not possible to provide your data in one of our standard formats then we have specialist programmers able to import data from virtually any database, CSV or spreadsheet (Excel) format - providing that we can get access to a snapshot of your database. This is done for a modest fee.

We already have a website with lots of product data but even though we have spent a lot of money on it, for a number of reasons continuing with the old website solution is no longer viable. Can you import the existing data into a new pagebloom hosted site for us?

Yes we can, assuming we can get a copy of the database used by your existing website we can import the data in that database and import it into your new pagebloom database. We can import data from oscommerce and a number of other open source systems for a modest fee, depending on the complexity of the source database.

How can I bulk import people into an organization on my website?

Understanding Roles when importing People

If you have been using pagebloom for even a short time you will understand the power of 'roles'. People can be granted particular roles.
Some roles allow people to make content changes to an organization's web pages while others allow them to submit a post in a chat room or add a match report or start a new process.
For organizations like sports clubs there are roles specific to teams like Coach, Manager, Parent/Guardian etc.,
Subscriptions to particular news feeds or news letters are actually managed via roles.
The organization administrator has access to the "People" panel in the admin screens. From there they can select a person and grant or revoke that person's roles.

Import basics

Importing of people is performed by providing a file (eg., Excel spreadsheet) containing the data.
Each column in the file hold a particular type of field. For example there are columns for first name, last name, email address etc.,
NOTE: The first 3 lines of each file is ignored! These are reserved "header rows" and are informational only. No data is imported for these header rows.
Each row after the header rows in the file contain details for a particular person.
Some columns are mandatory. This means that every row in the file (after the header rows) must have a value in the cell for that column.

Import format

This table specifies the columns of the standard pagebloom person import file.
 
Index  Name Description Mandatory
1 Organization Roles A set of role acronyms separated by space that the person will be granted. See list of roles and their acronyms in the table below N
If none provided will default to being a subscriber
2 First name First name of the person Y
3 Last name Last name of the person N
4 Email Email address of the person N
5 Mobile Mobile phone number N
6 Home Home phone number N
7 Org Unit Specifies which organizational unit (eg., department, team, committee) the person will be imported to. If the import is initiated for or on behalf of a specific organization unit and all people are being imported into that organization and not expected to be added to child organizatons of that organization then this field can be left blank and all people will be imported into the current organization.
If you want to import at a higher level in the organizational structure then this column lets you specify the target sub or child organization into which to import the person.
NOTE: In most cases, eg., a sports team manager importing people into his team, then this column can be left blank as there are no sub organizations under the team organization.		 N

Roles and their acronyms:
Role type Acronym
Coach CO