Tag: Wordpress

CSV Importer Plugin for WordPress

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 post
  • csv_post_post – body of the post
  • csv_post_type – post, page or 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.

Distraction Free Writing in WordPress

Developers are promising some sort of distraction-free post writing/editing in the next version of WordPress, but the Zen plugin implements that today. It also includes several different themes to choose from. And while I like the idea of a distraction-free option, I’ll never understand why a feature like that gets chosen to be added to the WordPress core while something like a decent caching feature is left entirely to plugins.

User Spam Remover for WordPress

Akismet does a pretty good job of catching most comment spam on WordPress blogs, but you still tend to end up with hundreds (in my case thousands) of user accounts registered by spam bots that just sit there cluttering up the user list.

User Spam Remover is a plugin for WordPress that fixes this problem by automatically removing any accounts that have not made a non-spam comment in > x days since it was created. It can also be set to block that stupid email notification that WordPress sends every time a new user signs up.

Dynamic Widgets Plugin for WordPress

Dynamic Widgets is another plugin for WordPress that lets the user customize which widgets appear on the sidebar based on the specific context of the page, post type, user type, etc. This one seems to be more actively developed than some of the other plugins that perform this function, and seems to have support for a lot more contexts:

  • Default widget display setting is supported for:
    • User roles
    • Dates
    • Language (WPML)
    • Front page
    • Single post pages
    • Pages
    • Author pages
    • Category pages
    • Archive pages
    • Error Page
    • Search Page
    • Custom Post Types
    • WP Shopping Cart / WP E-Commerce Categories
  • Exceptions can be created for:
    • User roles on role, including not logged in (anonymous) users
    • Dates on from, to or range
    • Language (WPML) on language
    • Single post pages on Author, Categories, Tags and/or Individual posts
    • Pages on Page Title, including inheritance from hierarchical parents
    • Author pages on Author
    • Category pages on Category name
    • Custom Posts Type on Custom post name, including inheritance from hierarchical parents
    • WP Shopping Cart / WP E-Commerce Categories on Category name