CSV Importer Improved

Screenshots

This WordPress plugin imports posts from CSV (Comma Separated Value) files into your WordPress blog. It can prove extremely useful when you want to import a bunch of posts from an Excel document or the like – simply export your document into a CSV file and the plugin will take care of the rest. https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer-improved/ Features Imports post title, body, excerpt, tags, date, categories etc. Supports custom fields, custom taxonomies and comments Deals with Word-style quotes and other non-standard characters using WordPress’ built-in mechanism (same one that normalizes your input when you write your posts) Columns in the CSV file can be in any order, provided that they have correct headings Multi-language support This plugin is forked from https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer/ by dvkob in order to keep up with changes to the core WordPress. This importer writes directly to the database. It does not go through the internal WordPress objects for creating posts etc. That may be an advantage to you (it will be faster for large imports) but do be aware of any data integrity issues that may arrise. Only UTF-8 encoding is supported, both with and without Byte Order Marks (BOM). The development repository for this plugin can be found here: https://github.com/academe/csv-importer-improved Please feel free to raise issues there, and submit pull requests, as well as through the normal WordPress channels. Usage Click on the CSV Importer link on your WordPress admin page, choose the file you would like to import and click Import. The examples directory inside the plugin’s directory contains several files that demonstrate how to use the plugin. The best way to get started is to import one of these files and look at the results. CSV is a tabular format that consists of rows and columns. Each row in a CSV file represents a post; each column identifies a piece of information that comprises a post. You can create new posts, or update existing posts by supplying the csv_post_id field pointing to an existing post. When updating, all field names you provide in the CSV file will be updated – even if blank – but fields you don’t list at the head of the CSV file will be left intact. Basic post information csv_post_id – optional, used to update an existing post. csv_post_title – title of the post csv_post_post – body of the post csv_post_type – post, page or a custom post type. From 0.3.2, csv_post_type column supports custom post types. Refer to the WordPress documentation on custom post types for more info on how to set up custom post types. csv_post_excerpt – post excerpt csv_post_categories – a comma separated list of category names or ids. The list must be enclosed in quotes, e.g. “EC > UK, Island”. If a chain of subcategories does not exist, e.g. Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia then they will all be created and the post assigned to the end of the chain. The parent category can also be defined using its id, e.g. 42 > Primates > Callitrichidae, where 42 is an existing category id. csv_post_tags – a “quoted” comma separated list of tags. csv_post_date – most standard formats are supported. For example, now, 11/16/2009 0:00, 1999-12-31 23:55:00, +1 week, next Thursday, last year are all valid. For technical details, consult PHP’s strtotime() function documentation. Custom fields Any column that doesn’t start with csv_ is considered to be a custom field name. The data in that column will be imported as the custom fields value. All custom fields must be unique. Multiple fields with the same name will be updated to the same value if updating an existing post. Prior to version 0.6.0 loading the same field name multiple times to an existing post would create multiple custom fields. General remarks WordPress pages don’t have categories or tags. Most columns are optional. Either csv_post_title, csv_post_post or csv_post_excerpt are sufficient to create a post. If all of these columns are empty in a row, the plugin will skip that row. The plugin will attempt to reuse existing categories or tags; if an existing category or tag cannot be found, the plugin will create it. To specify a category that has a greater than sign (>) in the name, use the HTML entity > Advanced usage csv_post_author – numeric user id or login name. If not specified or user does not exist, the plugin will assign the posts to the user performing the import. csv_post_slug – post slug used in permalinks. csv_post_parent – post parent id. Custom taxonomies New in version 0.3.0 Once custom taxonomies are set up in your theme’s functions.php file or by using a 3rd party plugin, csv_ctax_(taxonomy name) columns can be used to assign imported data to the taxonomies. Non-hierarchical taxonomies The syntax for non-hierarchical taxonomies is straightforward and is essentially the same as the csv_post_tags syntax. Hierarchical taxonomies The syntax for hierarchical taxonomies is more complicated. Each hierarchical taxonomy field is a tiny two-column CSV file, where the order of columns matters. The first column contains the name of the parent term and the second column contains the name of the child term. Top level terms have to be preceded either by an empty string or a 0 (zero). Sample examples/custom-taxonomies.csv file included with the plugin illustrates custom taxonomy support. To see how it works, make sure to set up custom taxonomies from functions.inc.php. Make sure that the quotation marks used as text delimiters in csv_ctax_ columns are regular ASCII double quotes, not typographical quotes like “ (U+201C) and ” (U+201D). Comments New in version 0.3.1 An example file with comments is included in the examples directory. In short, comments can be imported along with posts by specifying columns such as csv_comment_*_author, csv_comment_*_content etc, where * is a comment ID number. This ID doesn’t go into WordPress. It is only there to have the connection information in the CSV file. Credits This plugin uses php-csv-parser by Kazuyoshi Tlacaelel. It was inspired by JayBlogger’s CSV Import plugin. Contributors: Kevin Hagerty (post_author support) Edir Pedro (root category option and tableless HTML markup) Frank Loeffler (comments support) Micah Gates (subcategory syntax) David Hollander (deprecation warnings, linebreak handling)