Add Images, Flash, Google Maps and More

I’ve been finding a lot of users turning away CSV 2 POST before using it because they think it does not allow the display of images in auto-blogged posts. This post is just to help clear things up a little.

“Does CSV 2 POST import images?”

• Yes. The free edition can display images in your posts using URL data.
• The paid edition can actually import image files to the media gallery.
• Work is ongoing to allow the plugin to do more with images, the free edition will be improved as always. The ability to use multiple images in one field (meaning each URL is separated by a comma) is one improvement to come.

Flash, Google Maps and Other HTML
CSV 2 POST makes use of the WordPress WYSIWYG editor for the creation of a template. We can design the layout and look of our posts with a template that is used to create all posts but each row/record of your data is applied to that template so that each post is different.

All done automatically and in high numbers in short time if you want.

Using the WYSIWYG editor allows us to use the HTML window. In the HTML window we can paste (CTRL + V) any snippets.

• YouTube videos
• Google Maps
• Shortcodes
• iFrames
• HTML Image code
• HTML Link code

Some of the above mentioned snippets of code may require a little studying for beginners. You must replace the attribute values with what we call Column Replacement Tokens or “tokens” for short. Our tokens are what allows each post to be different because the tokens are replaced with your own data i.e. if you wanted to use Google Maps you would need to have all the required Google Maps data such as co-ordinates. Then you would need to replace the snippets existing co-ordinates and other data with your tokens. During post creation each map for each post will be different. If you do not add tokens to the snippet, every post would have the same map.

That is how all snippets work. Users must replace the attribute values such as URL’s and alt text. As for the ‘alt’ attribute, we can add more then one token plus text. So we can essentially create a sentence of text made up of data in our CSV file and some text between each part of data so that it makes sense.

Examples

• +PRODUCTNAME+ from only +PRICETOKEN+
• +name+ is +age+ years old
• Was +oldprices+, now +newprices+

You will notice how the tokens vary, a lot. That is because tokens include your CSV file headers. There is not a generic set of tokens (not yet but it may change for an alternative approach) i.e. +price+, +url+, +description+ and so on. CSV 2 POST is better than that because you can work with the header names you know.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/csv-2-post/