We keep noticing that there is some confusion around the status of Resource Importer and other components, the Site Initializers, Accelerators and Fragments ZIP that people tend to consider as replacement for the Resource Importer. The goal of this post is to provide a clarification about the current status and our future plans.

The Resource Importer has been deprecated a long time ago. Yeah, it is a fact. The main reason for deprecating the Resource Importer was that it was an old component which originally had not been designed for a robust importing tool. It had not been improved that much for a longer time period before the decision was made and the cost/value rate of keeping that supported was high.

Unfortunately, the decision of the replacement has not been made carefully at that time. Now, we are about finding the way out of this situation, however that will not be fast, sorry.

As for the current state of the Resource Importer, having that deprecated does not mean that we dropped completely. Unintended behavior may or may not be resolved depending on the level of effort. It stays with us for a while. It means that we investigate all the requests coming in and will do our best to handle them, however it is not on top priority.

Whenever the Resource Importer meets your needs it is fine to to use it. When we develop a more flexible alternative we’ll facilitate instructions to migrate. However, anytime the Resource Importer does not meet the needs then API based solutions should be used first.

We would like to highlight that also, Site Initializers just provides an API that 3rd party developers can use to execute code to initialize a site after its creation. They are not intended to be a replacement to Resource Importer, although it could be used that way by writing the necessary code to create pages, content and other data that can be defined in the Resource Importer JSON. We have plans to make this easier in the future, requiring less coding, but we are not there yet.

Finally, as it has been mentioned already, we are working on implementing alternatives for which we need all of your feedback. Please, share all of your requests, needs and we will definitely consider them in the future implementations.