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1. WebTechGlobal
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   There is one thing I learned the hard way and that was providing a rubbish free edition. I mean, not enough features and at one point I thought it was alright to provide a free edition that does nothing.

   Now, considering the number of premium plugins you can download that require you to activate by API. I thought that would be fine. But, WordPress removed my older free edition after a complaint was made. In my eyes they are encouraging developers to use WordPress.org to get easy traffic. They can release a plugin that does very little and get traffic to their site by asking users to visit their pages if they want the key in order to use the plugin.

   That is not something I wish to do, ever. No API that prevents the use of all features, maybe just the more advanced premium ones.

   Question is, what free features should I provided?

   Please let me know what you think. I want to provide a newer free edition before the end of 2011. It will probably be the final release not including any tweaks or small changes. I'm talking entire features or abilities. What should the free edition have and what should it not have?

   I want to provide a free edition that is suitable for small projects and less professional users. Professional users usually require a lot of advanced features that require a lot of support, even if they don't know it yet. The free edition simply has to be a good post creator for those not too worried about perfect SEO, content spinning, building cool designs or merging records together etc.

   So, what do you want in a, standard sort of importer?

2. globaltimoto
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   Hello

   Right now all I would like to be able to do is:

   1. Select a csv to import.
   2. Feedback from the importer to show what is going to be imported based on the 1st row (headings) verifying that they conform to standards.
   3. Select or specify the part of the DB to write to eg. wp_posts
   4. Feedback from the importer showing what was imported.

   I've tried this with a couple of other plugins without success, perhaps I'm not doing it right though.

   cheers

3. WebTechGlobal
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   Thank you globaltimoto

   Sounds like you just want something very simple. I think that is what I'm going to provide in the end but I wanted to see if anyone would request ability to create tags, categories and custom fields in a simple importer.

   I'm not sure if your actually trying to import data directly to a table such as wp_posts but very few importers would do that.

   Easy CSV Importer is the only one that I know that actually imports the data as it is to a project table, allowing the data to be used for various other uses. This approach is something I'm going to expand on a great deal in 2012.

   They actually pass the data to WordPress functions, it is WordPress itself that inserts the data to the database. You may know about MySQL but it is never that simple.

   Say for example the users CSV file has 2-3 duplicate rows. Do I code in functions to check for duplicate posts? Do I provide options to allow duplicates? How do I deal with duplicate rows on the fly at the time, do I somehow tell the user? If I don't, there is a good chance the user will blame the plugin because I've found most people using these plugins do not consider there data first. They usually blame the plugin. So for the sake of making the plugin look good, I should really protect its imaging by checking for duplicates.

   And that would be the start of me creating something a bit more advanced. It is hard to know where to stop.

4. WebTechGlobal
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   globaltimoto thank you for your comment.

   Please watch WebTechGlobal, when the time comes I would appreciate you testing any importer I created.

   There is an advanced one planned for 2012 but I'll get another free edition for ECI released before the year is out.

5. globaltimoto
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   Hello again.

   Yes I'm trying to import and insert data into the wp MySQL database. But perhaps there is a simpler way to do this rather than via a wp plugin. I'm still researching.

   Sure you could check for duplicates, but there are other plugins that do that once the data is already in, so people can use those if they need to.

   Perhaps it might be an idea to name and describe the plugin(s) in a different way.

   csv exporter/importer (basic)
   Does the basic job of exporting and importing csv fields to an existing wp site. The export gives you the necessary format to work with in a csv editor, the import obeys the format of the exporter. No bells or whistles.

   csv importer (pro)
   Allows you to import and specify lots of configuration. List all the features..., but does NOT allow you to edit code etc with a WYSIWYG editor.

   csv site builder
   Build entire wp sites just using a csv file and this plugin. Includes the edit features of WYSIWG editor etc to help visualise what you are creating.

   Perhaps you don't want to develop yet another separation, but it might help satisfy the different needs.

   I looked at the current "easy csv importer" and it looks nothing like easy. There are way too many options and parameters to play with before you realise what you are getting into, which is really a very in-depth and powerful tool. I failed to see how I could use the plugin to import data into my existing wp site.

   People like me are just looking for a way to add 100-300 pages (posts) to add skeleton pages or even content filled ones to an existing site. I'm not sure how many people are looking for that feature set though.

6. WebTechGlobal
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   If you only want posts. No tags, no meta data, no custom fields, no media, no featured image etc

   Then yes maybe it would be easy to import data to the wp_posts table without breaking your blog. But you would still need the plugin to have a function to create a permalink, it would need to ensure the permalink is unique. It would need to append a value if the permalink/slug was not unique.

   What about categories. If you create posts in this matter, they will not be in categories.

   Is that what your saying you want, just posts. No other data connected to them?

7. globaltimoto
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   Hello once more

   I've now found that this plugin does most of what I need:

   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-csv-to-database/

   So far though it seems that this plugin, or perhaps wp core, is creating new permalinks automatically. So it would appear my site is not broken...yet.

   What the plugin doesn't deal with is the ID number. If I leave it blank the import won't work, if I enter an ID already used it won't work, but if I enter an unused ID number it will work.

   All I have to do is use a spreadsheet or UltraEdit to insert a column of new ID numbers and now I can import my rows to my heart's content.

   So perhaps I have found my solution already.

8. WebTechGlobal
   Member
   Posted 9 months ago #

   Yes that is a very simple plugin. There are more free plugins out there keep looking. It's only about 300 lines of code. Wouldn't take much to tweak it for your needs.

   But I suppose that is what I started doing with my plugin and it never stopped lol

   Good luck with it all.

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