Import posts from CSV files into WordPress.
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.
WP All Import Pro can import custom fields, taxonomies, WooCommerce, images and galleries, users, ACF, and everything else:
Check out WP All Import today.
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.
csv_post_title
– title of the postcsv_post_post
– body of the postcsv_post_type
– post
, page
or a custom post type.csv_post_type
column was added to support custom post types as well.csv_post_excerpt
– post excerptcsv_post_categories
– a comma separated list of category names or ids.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.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.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.
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.>
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.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).
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.
This plugin uses php-csv-parser by Kazuyoshi Tlacaelel. It was inspired by JayBlogger’s CSV Import plugin.
Contributors:
Installing the plugin:
wp-content/plugins
.I have quotation marks and commas as values in my CSV file. How do I tell CSV Importer to use a different separator?
It doesn’t really matter what kind of separator you use if your file is properly escaped. To see what I mean by proper escaping, take a look at examples/sample.csv
file which has cells with quotation marks and commas.
If the software you use for exporting to CSV is unable to escape quotation marks and commas, you might want to give OpenOffice Calc a try.
How can I import characters with diacritics, Cyrillic or Han characters?
Make sure to save your CSV file with utf-8 encoding.
Prior to version 6.0.4, MySQL did not support some rare Han characters. As a workaround, you can insert characters such as 𠊎 (U+2028E) by converting them to HTML entities – 𠊎
I cannot import anything – the plugin displays “Imported 0 posts in 0.01 seconds.”
Update to version 0.3.1 or greater. Previous versions required write access to the /tmp directory and the plugin failed if access was denied by PHP’s safe mode or other settings.
I’m importing a file, but not all rows in it are imported and I don’t see a confirmation message. Why?
WordPress can be many things, but one thing it’s not is blazing fast. The reason why not all rows are imported and there’s no confirmation message is that the plugin times out during execution – PHP decides that it has been running too long and terminates it.
There are a number of solutions you can try. First, make sure that you’re not using any plugins that may slow down post insertion. For example, a Twitter plugin might attempt to tweet every post you import – not a very good idea if you have 200 posts. Second, you can break up a file into smaller chunks that take less time to import and therefore will not cause the plugin to time out. Third, you can try adjusting PHP’s max_execution_time
option that sets how long scripts are allowed to run. Description of how to do it is beyond the scope of this FAQ – you should search the web and/or use your web host’s help to find out how. However, putting the following line in .htaccess
file inside public_html directory works for some people:
php_value max_execution_time 120
The problem can be approached from another angle, namely instead of giving scripts more time to run making them run faster. There’s not much I can do to speed up the plugin (you can contact me at dvkobozev at gmail.com if you like to prove me wrong), so you can try to speed up WordPress. It is a pretty broad topic, ranging from database optimizations to PHP accelerators such as APC, eAccelerator or XCache, so I’m afraid you’re on your own here.
I receive the following error when I try to import my CSV file: “Invalid CSV file: header length and/or row lengths do not match”. What’s wrong with your plugin/my file?
Short answer: update to version 0.2.0 or later. Longer answer: the number of fields (values) in rows in your file does not match the number of columns. Version 0.2.0 pads such rows with empty values (if there are more columns than cells in a row) or discards extra fields (if there are less columns than cells in a row).
I’m getting the following error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in .../public_html/wp-content/plugins/csv-importer/File_CSV_DataSource/DataSource.php on line 61
. What gives?
This plugin requires PHP5, while you probably have PHP4 or older. Update your PHP installation or ask your hosting provider to do it for you.
title
(All in One SEO Pack uses those, for example).