I ran into a situation recently where I needed to import over 600 blog articles that had been written into a Wordpress blog. The other complexity was that these articles were all in individual Microsoft Word Docs and not in some other blog platform like Blogger or MoveableType. So I needed a way to be able to quickly combine all the Word Docs into one spreadsheet and import them all at one time! Even that would be time consuming considering I had to do 600 Articles but it will still save me days from inputing each blog article one by one. After alot of research and much trail and error and finally found something that worked for me. Note that I was using Wordpress 2.7 at the time of importing.
Plugin I Tried To Use But Failed
A CSV Import script posted by Zack Preble is probably what most of you will come across. It was the first script I tried using without any luck. It imported a bunch of mashed up junk, confusing the titles for the categories and vice versa. If you are using the most recent version at the time of this post which is 2.7, I don’t recommend using Zack’s script until he updates it to work with this most recent version.
Plugin That Worked For CSV Importing of Content to Wordpress
After trying various random ideas, I finally came across a plugin posted by JayBlogger. It’s apparently a script that he payed a developer to put together and it worked like a charm for Wordpress 2.7. The only issue I ran into was importing the categories. But with this plugin I was successfully able to import the following fields from the CSV file:
- Post Title
- Post Content
- Tags
- Timestamp
Here’s Exactly What I Did Step By Step
- Go to JayBlogger and download his plugin
- Unzip and upload the folder to your plugins directory
- Activate the plugin
- Look for the Import CSV page in your Admin Panel
- Put together your CSV file by opening up the Test CSV file inside the plugin directory
- Be sure to use the same format they use
- Make sure your Timestamp date is in this format – “Feb 19, 2009 18:22:11 PMâ€Â
- Import Your CSV File and enjoy!
The only bug I ran into with this plugin with Wordpress 2.7 is that the Categories would not import. But in my case I didn’t need it to, I just needed the tags. This is something however that will most likely be important too many of you. I will keep you informed on when/if there is a fix for this.
- Digg this post
- Bookmark this post on del.icio.us
- Stumble this post
- Mention on Facebook
Hi Chase,
Thanks for the write up on the product. Not sure why the categories didn’t pull in as they normally do. It might be the format of the category in the csv file. Were you adding into multiple categories per post? If so, it could have been the comma between the category names.
If you whizz a couple of records over in your csv file to me via email, I can take a look to see what went wrong for you as this works for most people.
Thanks
Jason
The plugin worked for me! Categories and all. Now to hop over to Jayblogger’s site to see how customizable it might be for the future… I’m already in seventh heaven – this is going to save me a lot of time and money!
Sounds like just what I am looking for. I’m just about to set up a new site and want to import a batch of posts to get it started.
Thanks for the step by step walkthrough.
Hello…i have a problem..The system show me this error: “warning: File does not exist: c:\windows\temp\php6f.tmp ”
Anyone help me?
Hi guys,
This is something I have been looking for. I have over 30,000 articles I need imported into wordpress and believe me, I have tried everything. Some how php memory always fails for me no matter what plugin I use and no matter how much I increase the php memory by. Will this plugin crash or give me a php out of memory error if i attempt to upload 30,ooo plus articles? What is the limit of this plugin? Perhaps doing batch uploads of 500?
Cheers
HI All,
Does anyone know if you can also bulk import the keywords and descriptions for the articles on top of the post title, category, date stamp etc?
Jyablogger could you advise here?
thanks in advance
Hi Tahire,
The paid for version allows you to add additional custom fields such as keyword tags, descriptions etc…
The free version doesn’t.
Hope this helps…
JayBlogger
Hi Jayblogger,
Thank you for your response, I am now looking to purchase csv pro, can you tell me what if any support I can expect, do yo have a particular support email address for paid customers?
I have downloaded and tried the free version and have come across the following issues,
out of 142 articles only 108 were loaded.
date stamp and other inappropriate content has been pushed into tags on my website, please see the website for issues.
Please can you tell me what is causing this as I want to be certain that I will not have this issue with the paid version also.
I have also used multiple categries and tags for some posts, this hasn’t worked either, is t his not supported in the free verion.
I can also send you me csv file so you can confirm that I have not done anything wrong.
many thanks
Hi All,
Just wanted to update my last post below. PLeased to say that this plugin works fine. The problems I was having were related to a specific segement of articles that covered fixes viruses, the content had lots of hashes and other weird syntaxes, once I took these articles out and just uploaded the regular content it worked great.
I have tred several other plugins and this one works the best, the others didnt actually work at all.
Thanks jayblogger, will now be upgrading to the paid product
Ah yes however you would not have used CSV 2 POST PLUS, the paid edition of the CSV 2 POST plugin lol
Have you even tried the free edition which gives you a little insight to the best csv import plugin for wordpress and it only 3 months old, still being constantly developed.
http://www.csv2post.com, which I am the developer off and looking for people to review my plugin and write articles on it, for a fee.
Regards
Ryan Bayne
Me again!
Quick update to let you know that a WYSIWYG editor has been added to CSV 2 POST and you can login to a demo blog to give it a test drive…
http://demo.csv2post.com
Click login and the access details are on the login form. I’m keen on you reviewing my plugin.
Ryan
Thanks for the post. Started using Wordpress a couple of days ago, and need to import CSV. Will pop on over to JayBlogger’s site to get the plug-in.
Thanks again
I tried to follow the instructions for this plugin, but I get a Fatal Error when trying to activate.
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘importCSV-.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/share/pear’) in /home/sites/mclportal.net/public_html/timstrees/wp-content/plugins/importCSV.php on line 13
I have tried with or without the importCSV directory, but get the same error.
I am running v 2.8.5 of Wordpress on a hosted site.
There were no example files with my download, so I am struggling to understand the exact format as categories are mentioned, but no example of their relative field position is mentioned.
Any help appreciated
I tried to follow the instructions for this plugin, but I get a Fatal Error when trying to activate.
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Fatal error: : Failed opening required ‘importCSV-.php’ in /home/sites/mclportal.net/public_html/timstrees/wp-content/plugins/importCSV.php on line 13
I have tried with or without the importCSV directory, but get the same error.
I am running v 2.8.5 of Wordpress on a hosted site.
There were no example files with my download, so I am struggling to understand the exact format as categories are mentioned, but no example of their relative field position is mentioned.
Any help appreciated