Using Feeds for advanced data migration
When it comes to data migration and synchronization, odd demands are the norm these days. You might need to deal with custom SQL databases, XMLs, CSVs, XLSs, and many other sorts of data format.
While writing custom code to handle each of these can be painful, http://drupal.org/project/feeds can be of great use when trying to get strange data formats to play nicely with Drupal.
If you have troubles getting these data sources to work with Drupal or you want to learn a faster and/or maintainable way to do so, come join us. After the session you'll be able to quickly build importers and write simple plugins to extend functionality to your needs.
I'll also introduce the usage of Feeds Tamper (http://drupal.org/project/feeds_tamper) to massage the data parsed before mapping it.
Comments
When it comes to importing data from other sources, Migrate and Feeds are the go-to solutions the community seems to look for. Feeds has the obvious advantage of a UI, while Migrate has rollback operations (wonderful for testing migrating code).
But I bet there are use cases each tool might suit best. I'd like to seee what are the use cases where Feeds excels, and particularly where it falls short.
I hope it will be interesting session! Working with Feeds sometimes could not be very easy especially if you have complex data structure. Franz has great experience with Feeds and made recent contributions to this module.