Daniel Nouri's Blog

LovelySync is a small and quite flexible library for importing data into the ZODB, the object database that Plone uses. In theory it can be used as a library for anything that needs to be imported into any database (yeah, sure I hear you say). But I've only ever used it with the ZODB as the target database.

One of Lovely's customers needed to synchronize a Filemaker database regularly with their Plone site. The database was quite complex; it had different languages (which we mapped into LinguaPlone content), images, and all kinds of references between the objects. At the time I began working for the project, we didn't know exactly how the export format would look like, so we had to develop something that was easily adjustable: The input format is easily customized using schema files. All the actual writing is delegated to small specialized components called WriteHandlers. Reading is done by the Reader, which supplies the Writer (which is the object delegating to WriteHandlers) with Records. You might want to check out the interfaces file for the technical details.

LovelySync, originally written more than a year ago, but refactored a lot lately, was the first project where I used the Component Architecture of Zope 3 extensively, and quite successfully (and without ZCML ;). Using LovelySync, I've been doing imports for hundreds of members from a CSV file into Plone, screen scraping contents into Plone sites for migration, and even an import of usenet (NNTP) groups into Listen through nntp2listen, which will be in a public SVN shortly.

So if ArcheCSV doesn't exactly do what you want, and PLIP 112 is too far away for you, you might want to try LovelySync.