This WordPress 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.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer-improved/

Features

• Imports post title, body, excerpt, tags, date, categories etc.
• Supports custom fields, custom taxonomies and comments
• Deals with Word-style quotes and other non-standard characters using WordPress' built-in mechanism (same one that normalizes your input when you write your posts)
• Columns in the CSV file can be in any order, provided that they have correct headings
• Multi-language support

This plugin is forked from https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer/ by dvkob in order to keep up with changes to the core WordPress.

This importer writes directly to the database. It does not go through the internal WordPress objects for creating posts etc. That may be an advantage to you (it will be faster for large imports) but do be aware of any data integrity issues that may arrise.

Only UTF-8 encoding is supported, both with and without Byte Order Marks (BOM).

The development repository for this plugin can be found here:

https://github.com/academe/csv-importer-improved

Please feel free to raise issues there, and submit pull requests, as well as through the normal WordPress channels.

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:

# Sets max execution time to 2 minutes. Adjust as necessary.
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.

0.6.0

• Change behaviour of custom fields; treat all fields as unique and don't create duplicates.

0.5.4

• No functional changes; just a forced update after fixing some SVN issues.

0.5.1

• Fix incorrect intitial status.
• Started making strings translatable.

0.5.0

• Update PHP version to 5.3+
• Support updating existing posts.

0.4.2

• Renamed from "CSV Importer 2" to "CSV Importer Improved".

0.4.1

• Fix some function name clashes with other CSV import plugins.

0.4.0

• Fixes to support WordPress 4.4

0.3.8

• Minor bug and security fixes

0.3.7

• Make hierarchical custom taxonomy line splitting more robust
• Fix deprecation warnings

0.3.6

• Fix category cleanup bug

0.3.5

• Added 'greater-than' category syntax
• Updated the docs

0.3.4

• Added csv_post_parent column
• Updated the docs
• Got rid of a deprecation warning

0.3.3

• Fixes incompatibility with versions of WordPress prior to 3.0 introduced in previous release.

0.3.2

• Added ability to specify custom post type.

0.3.1

• Import comments.
• Updated php-csv-parser - the plugin should no longer create files in /tmp.

0.3.0

• Custom taxonomies.

0.2.4

• Root category selection, cleaner HTML.

0.2.3

• Slight speed increase, support for post_author and post_name.

0.2.2

• Bugfix release to deal with BOM that may occur in UTF-8 encoded files.

0.2.1

• Ability to import rows as pages, not posts.
• Starting with this version, you can also specify category ids instead of names.

0.2.0

• Ability to handle CSV files where the number of cells in rows does not match the number of columns
• Smart date parsing
• Code cleanup.

0.1.3

• New option to import posts with published status.

0.1.2

• Added support for post excerpts.

0.1.1

• Code cleanup
• Changed column names for CSV input. Sorry if it breaks anything for you, folks, but it had to be done in order to allow for custom fields such as title (All in One SEO Pack uses those, for example).

v0.1.0

• Initial version of the plugin

Installing the plugin:

1. Unzip the plugin's directory into wp-content/plugins.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. The plugin will be available under Tools -> CSV Importer on WordPress administration page.