Resolved I am looking to use RO CVSI to solve a problem I have (may be a duplicate)

Hello Michael,

Thank you for your interest in RO CSVI.

Can RO CSVI cope with the aspects detailed above?

Let me go through it step by step.

However some of the content on site A, specifically articles of particular categories, need to be available on site B.

In the export template you can define which categories should be exported, so that can handle this requirement. If there is also a need to not export certain articles from the selected categories, you can do that with the skip rule. You can define which articles should not be exported.

These articles are fairly standard, but contain one or 2 custom fields which are from the (Tassos) Advanced Custom Field component and not from the Joomla Core.

Custom fields work the same way as regular fields in RO CSVI and we do support Advanced Custom Fields by Tassos as explained in the Advanced Custom Fields for RO CSVI Export document.

All the categories and tags in the articles exist on both sites but have different category and tag IDs on each site.

As long as the category path matches. So site A has the category Garden/Hoses with ID 3 and site B has the category Garden/Hoses with ID 4, then it is not a problem because RO CSVI will look for Garden/Hoses and not for ID 4. That is why we suggest not to use the id field because most of the time the system can figure out the correct IDs. The same goes for tags, you can read about the tags in the Joomla Tags import article.

The custom fields refer to files to be downloaded (held in images/mabDownload on both sites) which will also need to be copied between sites.

That is something RO CSVI does not do. It is not a copy utility My suggestion would be to setup a cron job that does an rsync between the two folders. This will keep the folder synchronised between the two sites.

on an ongoing basis, update Site B with all additions, changes and deletions of the articles and files on Site A

Deletions are not handled this way because when you delete an article on site A, it will never appear in your import file, so there is nothing to process. The way this works now is that you can unpublish articles before the import starts and as the import runs, articles will be published.

Can RO CSVI do this, ideally in an automated fashion, but minimally by manual means?

You can fully automate this by setting up cron jobs. On site A you create your export template and store the exported file in an accessible location for site B. On site B you create your import template to read the import file from the url on site A. Setup a cron job on both sites A & B to run the import and export. That will then run fully automated.

Let us know if you have any further questions. You can play with the import and export on our demo site as well which you can find at https://demo.rolandd.com/administrator