I wanted to find a Wordpress plugin that allowed me to future post a whole bunch of posts that I could add to relevant categories and add a future timestamp too. Iwanted to use excel to create a csv file of the post preloaded with html links and the like to make sure that if I went away I could easily bulk add posts. Also I had an idea for a series and thought rather than build it each week I could upload the whole lot in one chunk. I am thinking about a 1 tip a day blog to so this would save me a huge amount of time.
I searched all the plugin sites, downloaded all the ones that claimed to do what I wanted and installed them. But something didn’t work with them. Not how I wanted them too anyway.
So to cut a long story short I found a coder and had them build one for me. It works like a charm for me and will allow me to build in some pretty cool stuff. I also toyed with the idea of selling it as I paid to have it built and it is a great little script. But then I thought if all the plugin owners felt like this, I would never would have half the cool stuff on my blog. So I am giving it away.
You don’t even need to give me an email address, just download and install it like a normal plugin.
Here you go…
Brief Instructions
Then once activated go to management
Then browse for the CSV file to import and click submit.
Thats it!
Creating the CSV file
Now to get the CSV file to work as you want it there are 5 fields you need to add:
title
post
tags
timestamp
category
You can even use categories that don’t exist yet. It will simply add them when they are posted.
Most are self explanatory, the post field can include HTML but remember when using excel to save as a CSV file.
There is a sample csv file in the zip file.
Enjoy.
If you like it let me know or share some comments. I designed it but didn’t build it so if you have problems let me know and I’ll try and help. If there are any features needed also let me know and I’ll see what we can do.
About the Author
I have spent the last 12 years working with Finance and Insurance companies using the Internet. I have also worked in that time or consulted with all of the major Insurance and Finance aggregators including MoneySupermarket, Confused, MoneyExtra, Moneynet and others...
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49 Comments Received
April 15th, 2008 @8:04 am
Hi, I saw the pluging you have designed, for importing csv, and I find if extremly interesting.
Do you think it’s posible for you to help me with an idea? I have to import csv with hotels content and generate static pages for each hotel page. All the content is in that csv.
Do you have any idea how to do that?
I really apreciate your help,
Thank you,
Mihai Costar
April 15th, 2008 @10:46 am
Hi Mihar,
It sounds like you have a csv file which you want to turn into lots of static HTML pages.
The best product to do this is Webmerge.
http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/index.html
This allows you to merge a csv file into a HTML template and it will build one page per record in your CSV file.
Hope this helps,
It works really well…
Jason
April 26th, 2008 @6:31 pm
I’ve been looking for a WP CSV importer for a long time. This one is close but I’m not sure it will work for me. I have a large CSV which is formated for directory listings. So its fields are pretty much business name, biz category, address, phone #, etc. Associating business name to post name is a given. But can I condense the multiple fields in the file to be imported into one “post” field without having to do it by hand?
April 27th, 2008 @8:30 am
Hi Dan,
I see your point. I see two ways of doing this. One you could create a html code template in Microsoft Word and import your fields intothe relvant part of the template then do a “mail merge” to create one html post per record.
You would then cut and paste each merged code page into another CSV file using the format I explain above.
This is one way.
The other ways is to buy Webmerge - http://www.fourthworld.com which does the same thing, buit it is build to merge csv files into html pages so a bit easier to use if you don’t hand code yourself.
Hope this helps….
If you get stuck let me know and I’ll see if I can help out with a html word document.
Jason
May 9th, 2008 @2:17 pm
Great Plugin Jay!!
Thank you for posting it!!
It worked great for me except for the date column….
I think that maybe I had the date in the wrong format so all the posts that I imported came out as being posted in 1969:(
If there is one tip I would share, It would be get your spreadsheet perfect before importing.
I didn’t, I had to go in and delete 250 posts, then, all the post number refrences start at 250 the next time you import (I did it three times!!:()
I went into the database through mysql but could not clear the # of posts (I’m not a database guy)
I would suggest importing one sample post the first time, (on a seperate spreadsheet), checking the post and making sure its exactly what you want before importing all the rest of your posts. It’s easier to delete one post than hundreds.
I was looking for a paypal donate button but could not find one…you should think about putting one on your website.
You’ve saved me hours of work!!
Anyways, thanks again Jay.
Gerry
May 9th, 2008 @3:10 pm
Hi Gerry,
Glad it worked okay. I will look at the instructions again for the date format. I will add a paypal button too! Thanks for the tip!
Jason
May 10th, 2008 @2:16 pm
Thanks Jay,
When I try to save the excel file as a csv it asks me if I want to continue because some of the features in excel wont be saved properly in a csv (or something along those lines).
When I re-open the file, the date is in this format 05/09/2008.
ive tried changing the date formatting in wordpress and in excel but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
If you could look into it it would be much appreciated.
Thanks again Jay,
Gerry
May 10th, 2008 @2:18 pm
Jason - not Jay….sorry
I keep thinking about the name of your blog!!
Gerry
May 10th, 2008 @2:24 pm
Did you try using the sample excel file I attached with the plugin?
Using that the Date field looks like this:
“Mar 19, 2008 16:54:11 PM”
In my version, it is a plain text field and not a date formatted field.
Use the above syntax to create your dates. You need to add in the times so Wordpress knows when to add in the post.
Hope this makes sense!
May 10th, 2008 @2:24 pm
Don’t worry I have been called worse!
May 12th, 2008 @5:55 pm
Hi Jason, you’re making it difficult to toss you a bone
I just tried your donate button and it must not be set up properly, I got the message “We were unable to decrypt the certificate id.”
Just thought I’d let you know,
Gerry
May 12th, 2008 @7:30 pm
Hi Gerry, thanks. It looks like Wordpress doesn’t like Encrypted Paypal buttons. I have decrypted it and now it works!
Thanks for letting me know.
Jason
May 16th, 2008 @6:30 am
Thanks for the great plugins. Does it work with custom fields?
May 16th, 2008 @9:59 am
Hi Max,
Not currently it only works with the five standard fields, I don’t use the custom fields. Sorry.
It may be something I do in the future but right now it does what I need it too!
Thanks
Jason
May 19th, 2008 @4:33 pm
Thanks.
Can your script post a post to more than 1 categories?
May 19th, 2008 @5:35 pm
Hi Max,
Yes just add the category name in the category field, If the category does not exist the plugin will add it as a new one.
Jason
May 22nd, 2008 @5:40 am
Great plugin. Thanks for sharing it with the community. Quick question. Is there away to import pages as static pages instead of posts?
May 22nd, 2008 @8:06 am
Hi Jonathan,
Sadly not and it is not something that it could do.
Jason
June 5th, 2008 @10:52 pm
Can you post to multiple categories for one post? Someone else asked this, but your answered as if they were asking about new categories.
Can you also have more than 1 tag on a post? If so, how do you separate them in the field?
June 11th, 2008 @10:49 am
This is neat. Any chance of an option to add our own fields? For example, add Custom Fields?
The best way to categorise posts in alternative ways is by custom fields with unique content, rather than having a post in say 3 different categories.
That way the Search Engines don’t get confused.
June 11th, 2008 @10:52 am
Hmmm.
The great strength of this plugin is the speed at which it could transfer, build or update a site. Build it in CSV, do a test run on another site, then do the real thing at the click of a button
June 11th, 2008 @9:11 pm
I have no plans to do this as yet, but will bear it im ind when I relook at this plugin.
Thanks
Jason
June 11th, 2008 @9:12 pm
I’d not thought about using for testing by yes I suppose you could do to make sure it all works.
Jason
June 13th, 2008 @10:31 am
Sorry Resh,
I missed this comment, have you tried adding a comma after adding the first category:
category1,category2
I think that will work.
Jason
June 13th, 2008 @1:11 pm
Hi Jay,
Thank Jay. It work very well…
if I may suggest on your timestamp, it would be better if you could do this way on the excel (below just example only):
Now
10 minutes
20 minutes
30 minutes
so if we have huge content of csv data feed from merchant then we just need to drag from excel column, less work for typing timestamp.
cheers
Yusuf
June 13th, 2008 @1:15 pm
Thanks for the feedback Yusuf,
I didn’t think people would need to post every 10 minutes, I didn’t. I’ll add it to the list of possible upgrades.
Cheers
Jason
June 15th, 2008 @9:40 am
Hi Jay,
You would need it if you are a member of affiliate, (say shareashale, cj, darkblue, etc).
Those marketing companies are providing you a data feed (sometime they call it “product feed” or “catalog feed), we can easily find thousands of product in the data feed provided.
I found a data feed with over 100,000 product in the file. so if we have a plugin that can upload the file into our web/blog every 5 minutes then it would be very great and it will make our blog always fresh.
Cheers,
Yusuf
June 15th, 2008 @3:43 pm
Yes I can see that. You can convert the datafeed into RSS and import using Wordpress but that would only give you them posted all at once.
I have used this in the past to do this:
http://www.datafeedtorss.com/
Good Luck
Jason
June 16th, 2008 @5:44 am
Jason,
Yes I know that we can convert datafeed into RSS. However, as we know that it would only give us posted all at once, and it would make our web static look.
I found a link that offering script at http://scamfreezone.com/t.cgi?a=208583&e=/10days/ for uploading csv in regular basis to our wp blog, but he charge us US$ 150 for the script only. and if we require his assistance direct to his email (not through helpdesk ticket) then he charge us another US$ 150.
I think your script is almost there, may be you could sell it later with cheap price or just ask the user to put your blog link.
cheers
Yusuf
June 16th, 2008 @7:17 am
Thanks Yusuf,
The reason I build this script was that Neil’s script didn’t do what I needed it to do. I’ll see what the implications are for adding this feature into the plugin.
Jason
July 1st, 2008 @10:45 pm
Hi there…
I’ve written a little Java program that takes an affiliate feed and converts it to your CSV format for your plug-in… However, I can’t seem to get the date format right. I have it as: Jul 1, 2008 18:29:29 PM and no matter what I do it comes up as “1970-01-01 04:59:59″ when I import it. Everything else looks ok.
Any ideas?
–Fitz
July 2nd, 2008 @5:51 am
Hi Fitz,
Nice! The only thing I can think of is you may need to create a custom date field in Excel as it sounds like it is reformating it.
The Import CSV Pro will allow you to use any combination of date, so you will be able to say 10 mins, 1 hour, and the like.
Let me know how you get on. What datafeeds are you using?
Cheers
Jason
August 5th, 2008 @2:05 pm
These questions are about the pro version. Is it possible to customize the layout of the content and excerpt without editing each individual record? Will this plugin overwrite records with the same title? Is there a readme I could look at? What much more besides custom fields does the pro version allow you to do? Can I use fields within my records, for example under the post field have %%post%%
August 5th, 2008 @2:13 pm
Hi Pete,
You build the post layout structure in excel before using it in the plugin so you can do pretty much what you like but it is done on a line by line basis. That said you could have a post layout per category and use that.
Not sure about fields within fields to be honest. Not something I have tried. I’m not that clever! The only thing I could suggest would be to try it on the free version to see if it pulls in the data you need form your other records.
All the info on the plugin is on this site. As most of the actual coding happens with what you build in excel, the plugin itself is very basic. There is no readme as such.
Hope this helps…
Jason
August 5th, 2008 @4:56 pm
A nice review on your plug in. Selling for $99.
http://www.johnchow.com/import-affiliate-datafeeds-with-import-csv-pro/
August 5th, 2008 @5:42 pm
Hi Jason,
Could you explain “you could have a post layout per category and use that.”
Thanks
August 5th, 2008 @9:32 pm
PistolPet
The free plugin (and I’m guessing therefore the Pro) does NOT overwrite existing posts.
You simply get a duplicate post with same timestamp - wordpress figures it out somehow. So you need to remove existing posts if you want to update them. Or if you want to add a load of new posts + old posts all at once.
Not sure how you remove old posts en masse.
Still, the free plugin works brilliantly.
The only problem is if the text contains linebreaks then in older versions of Excel (I use 2000) you have to turn off wrap text for each cell i.e. Format / Cells / Alignment -> wrap text.
You can record a macro to do that.
To get a long list of dates incremented by day, here’s my notes from the very helpful excelforum.com
August 6th, 2008 @8:24 am
Thanks for the input Richard,
I use the batch categories plugin to delete posts by category. This works if you are using a datafeed of products and you only upload feed posts into those categories.
Jason
August 15th, 2008 @2:32 pm
Great plugin, looking forward to your next project!
One quick comment. I’ve had a few examples where the information was ‘cut-off’ - see this example:
http://www.freetickets.org.uk/attraction/parc-asterix-theme-park-tickets-2/
Doesn’t happen often but as all the posts come from the same CSV file I don’t understand why it would happen on some posts and not others?
August 15th, 2008 @2:35 pm
Hi Gadget,
It could be a rogue piece of text like an apostrophe or something like that. It is is then you need to change it to the relevant ascii code.
Visit http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm
for a full list.
Good Luck. Site looks nice!
Jason
August 19th, 2008 @6:39 pm
A great addition to this would be to work with the SEO plugin, All-in-One SEO Plugin, to easily add title tags, meta tags, and description.
Can this be added to the plugin?
This would make my world!!!
Cheers,
Chris
August 20th, 2008 @6:42 am
Thanks for the comment Chris,
It doesn’t integrate currently. Not sure if you can add the custom fields needed by All-in-One SEO into the CSV file before uploading. The advanced script allows for custom fields.
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/importcsv/
I have seen users using it with Brain Gardners Revolution themes and adding the custom field required for that into the csv file, so it could work.
Thanks
Jason
September 22nd, 2008 @1:33 pm
Was the date issue mentioned above ever fixed? I installed this plugin over the weekend and created a CSV based on the sample format provided. All posts were dated for the future, but about 70-80% of them were published immediately. When I checked the posts table in my database, the dates on those posts had gotten totally screwed up somewhere in transit. Is there a fix for this?
September 22nd, 2008 @1:40 pm
Hi Rob,
Can you send me over a copy of your CSV file? The date issue has been fixed. It appears there could be something wrong with the format in the CSV field rather than the script itself.
Email j ason @ speedie pr . co . uk
Cheers
Jason
September 22nd, 2008 @5:33 pm
hi,
does this plugin work with wordpress mu ?
Cheers,
Daz
September 22nd, 2008 @5:40 pm
Hi Daz,
I don’t see why not. Any one who has an account can login and use the plugin if it is available on their admin section. Try installing the free version and see what happens if you login as a different user would be my best answer.
Cheers
Jason
September 22nd, 2008 @7:45 pm
Ok thanks will do;)
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