User Activity Import/Export Function

[trent]

It would actually be a great addition at some point down the road to have an import/export function for user content. This would be beneficial for both backing up, archiving as well as moving to another service.

[(none)]

Milestone Future Enhancements deleted

[DJPaul]

This is planned for BP 1.4.

[r-a-y]

Some articles to research when we revisit this:
​http://waterpigs.co.uk/articles/data-export/
​http://marketingland.com/soon-youll-be-able-to-keep-your-tweets-with-download-all-tweets-feature-29104

[slaFFik]

Is this still a core-pretender or a plugin territory?
All backup plugins can backup BuddyPress tables, so this is not a too important point.
Same for moving - all plugins, that help with moving are actually doing a some sort of backup of all tables (not only default in WordPress) and then restore it.
IMO, BuddyPress should not care about the way things are backed up or migrated. The same way as WordPress doesn't care.

So I assume this ticket to be more like a plugin territory, especially taking into account the big number of plugins that can do that and even some BuddyPress specific plugins.
Proposing to close the ticket.

[DJPaul]

In terms of import/export for site migrations or backup, I think it's something we'd like to have.

Also, allowing individual users to export their data from their profiles somehow is something that idealistically I think we want to offer one day. It's certainly something important to me, as we'd allow individuals to get access to their own (social) data.

[r-a-y]

#7393 was marked as a duplicate.

[r-a-y]

#7393 deals with individual user data export and nothing else. I think that might warrant its own issue as import/export is something else altogether.

If we're thinking about the user, maybe we offer two options:

1. Export as archive (which is basically #7393; see comment:7 for some examples),
2. Export as JSON (to import into another BP site) (would require planning for an importer)

Export as archive should be relatively straightforward (JSON file plus some form of HTML file with a nice way to view this data); export for the purposes of importing to another BuddyPress site requires some decisions on our part.

Let's say you're importing some activity items from another site that are connected to a group that doesn't exist on the new site. In this case, we would probably want to skip importing these items.

I'm also not sure if importing should be a user decision. This could be easily used by spammers to flood the activity stream.

With that being said, we should probably rename this ticket "BP Site Import/Export" and reopen #7393.