For awhile I’ve been looking for the best way to import CSV data into WordPress. So far, CSV Importer does pretty much everything I need.
After installing CSV Importer, you simply take your CSV file and add column titles such as,
csv_post_title– title of the postcsv_post_post– body of the postcsv_post_type–post,pageor a custom post type.csv_post_excerpt– post excerpt
It doesn’t matter what order you have the columns in as long as the column titles are correct. Moreover, CSV Importer assumes any column title that doesn’t begin with csv_ is a custom field, so you can import custom field data, and there’s a setting to import custom post data as well. Most fields are optional as well, so you could just import a single column of data just using the csv_post_title if you wanted to.
CSV Importer will let you mark the posts created as a result of the import as Drafts, so I took a Google Spreadsheet that I’ve wanted to import into my lifestream, added the column titles and massaged the data a bit, then hit import. It worked like a charm.
The only downside is CSV Importer requires PHP 5 and some folks might still be stuck on virtual servers still using PHP 4. Other than that, this is an awesome plugin that again reflects the strengths of WordPress and its developer community.
Thanks for this…I’ve used CSV Importer before and love it — but since I switched to my Mac, I lost the field names in my Excel file and now you’ve helped me start anew.
Plus, that’s cool about the post excerpt — I am going to use that directly. Now.
Yes, thank God Dreamhost uses PHP 5 — and the only thing I’ve found with csv importer is that it used to get hung up if I tried to import a large file full of thousands or hundreds of lines and records, so I would import maybe 200 at a time.
I will see if it lets me do more. Either way it’s all good (hopefully it’ll let me do more) because then the links will get indexed into Google more naturally.