If you’ve ever migrated content between RWS environments, you’re familiar with RWS’s Content Porter tool.

I’ve personally had a lot of experience with Content Porter (*smug face*). In the beginning it was painful ⁠— the process would fail and it would give a very technical error message. I’d blame the tool, I’d be throwing my fists in the air, and swearing my head off. I just wanted it to work without giving me any grief.

The truth of it is, it does work and if something fails when importing, it’s most likely that the package you’re trying to migrate is missing some dependent content items or there have been structural changes between the two environments. Investigating the logs helps you understand the issue(s) and, once resolved, you’ll port.

When you’ve spent more time understanding the common reasons why something won’t migrate, you’ll be glad that Content Porter fails. Because if it had brute-forced in the data, you’d likely end up in a mess, questioning why it allowed it to migrate.

I thought I’d seen every error message I could when it comes to content porting, until I recently got the following message:

“Zip is not a valid ImportExport package”

I’d not seen this before. Because Content Porter send the ZIP package to the server, I thought the machine had ran out of space or there were updated permissions issues blocking the files transmission to the server.

It could be those things, but this one was due to a load-balancing issue. See, the CME is split over two machines and the ZIP was being transmitted to one and then Content Porter was trying to run it from the other.

So, the fix was really easy. Rather than using the URL of the CMS when connecting, I simply used the IP on the load-balanced CM machines and presto! The issue was resolved.

Doing some content porting? We’ve the perfect add-on to make your porting life easier, check out the Porter for Content Porter.

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