[Plugin: CSV Importer] Is it possible also to update posts with this plugin?

maorb: You’re right in assuming that CSV Importer cannot update existing posts. This is by design: I wanted to be positive that CSV Importer is unable to mess with existing data. If all WordPress API functions used by the plugin can only insert data, there’s absolutely no way for the plugin to unintentionally alter or delete existing posts.

This is not to say that I’m not willing to rethink this issue. The plugin was designed to be an importer – a tool to migrate data from CSV to WordPress, not a way sync spreadsheets with WordPress on a regular basis. However, it looks like that’s exactly what the majority of plugin users is doing.

The major reason why this hasn’t been implemented yet is that adding an ability to update existing posts introduces a lot of complexity. Do you just overwrite everything? What about fields that were present in the initial import, but are missing from subsequent imports? What if the post has already been edited since it has been imported into WordPress?

I am also interested in this. It would be very cool to have a way of appending data.

+1

Updating via a CSV would be fantastic.

I think there would need to be options to keep or delete missing fields.

If the plugin also did the export (which I suspect it would need to) couldn’t the existing data be saved (concatenated and appended) in a custom field to the post (or in a separate table), and when importing it the process could compare the current data & saved data to check for any changes?

+2

CSV updating would be HUGE.

I’ve been a long-time user of this plugin — it’s awesome. But I have a number of projects wherein the data in nearly 1K posts/pages needs to be updated. No fun to do manually via the visual editor, ha ??

If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know.

+3 would love this feature…actually looking for the ability to prepend and ammend to all posts.

+4 I really need this feature, since I didn’t originally create all my posts with this plugin. I need to be able to upload a bunch of tags to all my posts, going off of the post id.

I’ve been looking EVERYWHERE for a solution to this. Does anybody know of anything?

I was going to ask for this very thing, too.
I say that since there is a function for updating posts, then it should be called from the plugin. You’d have to check user capability on each post.
I suggest one flag for post overwrite existing or not and a separate one for custom field overwrite or not.
I would prefer that it is updates, not deletes.

One other option I could suggest is a little unrelated: allow shortcode expansion before saving the post.

I’ve found a solution to this:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-post-corrector/

You can either upload posts, or update existing posts by putting the post id in a column. It works pretty well for me.

Hey, thanks for that!

wp-post-corrector

this plugin does not work and the developer website is scant with information. I have read that if you have version 1.0 you might have some success, but the newest version is buggy (does not allow me to download entire set of posts, among other things).

If the developer of CSV importer would please please please add the functionality to bulk update posts to the CSV importer plugin it would be much appreciated.

I’m not sure what you’re doing differently than me, but it certainly does work for me. I’ve gone through thousands posts and updated categories, tags, and custom fields.

I’m using the latest version (1.0.1) with the latest version of wordpress (3.2.1).

Actually, you are right about the download feature not working. It looks like it times out, but I have about 10,000 posts so there’s probably a memory issue. If you know the post id or slug (can find this in your database), make sure to include that in a column, then use the bulk update feature to upload your csv. It works like a charm!

Hope you can get it figured out. It’s too bad that there’s not a better supported solution for this…it seems like something that many people would want to use.

I think it would be a minor code change in CSV Importer to update instead of insert because wp_update_post() calls wp_insert_post() anyway. The wp_update_post function does the merging of the old data from the database with the new data you supply.