CSV Importer

This 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.

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

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.

Basic post information

• csv_post_title – title of the post
• csv_post_post – body of the post
• csv_post_type – post, page or a custom post type.
  New in version 0.3.2
  In prior versions, importing rows as pages could be specified on a
  per-file basis using the plugins UI. In 0.3.2, csv_post_type column
  was added to support custom post types as well.
  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.
  New in version 0.3.5
  It’s also possible to assign posts to non-existing subcategories, using
  > to denote category relationships, e.g. Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia.
  If any of the categories in the chain does not exist, the plugin will
  automatically create it. It’s also possible to specify the parent category
  using an id, as in 42 > Primates > Callitrichidae, where 42 is an
  existing category id.
• csv_post_tags – a comma separated list of tags.
• csv_post_date – about any English textual description of a date and time.
  For example, now, 11/16/2009 0:00, 1999-12-31 23:55:00, +1 week,
  next Thursday, last year are all valid descriptions. 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.

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)