Guidelines for Data

The wonderful Contents Magazine released a special report entitled Data Protection. In that report they outlined three principles for Data Protection. All three principles are fantastic, but number two really stood out to me.

No upload without download. Build in export capabilities from day one.

That seems pretty straightforward, but I started thinking of this in the context of the sites I build for clients. Our platform of choice at my company is Wordpress which has a capable Import/Export tool available.

Is this enough? Do my clients know about it? Is the XML it exports good enough that clients can migrate platforms in a couple years? A quick bit of searching uncovered the Export to Text plugin, which allows Wordpress users to export their data as plain txt files. This certainly seems better than XML, but again will my clients know how to use it if they want to leave? Should Wordpress have more robust export options built in?

I don't have any answers right now, but I think it's important that I do.

Do you have a solid solution for this type of situation? Let me know @a_simpson.