Import new events

  • Similar questions have been asked before, but I couldn’t find a working solution. While importing existing events from another plugin can be a hassle or even next to impossible, new events should be quite simple. Unfortunately, it turned out to be not so easy. I used the WP ALL Export plugin for exporting a test event. That gave me a nice CSV that could easily be modified using the preferred spreadsheet software. Importing the new CSV wasn’t a success, since most values have to be matched manually. This is not really a time saver. Not to mention that you have to convert the human-readable date to the UNIX timestamp.

    Has anybody found a solution that works AND really saves time?

    Thank you!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Guido

    (@guido07111975)

    While importing existing events from another plugin can be a hassle or even next to impossible, new events should be quite simple. Unfortunately, it turned out to be not so easy.

    I don’t understand this, why should importing new events be simple compared to existing events?

    Matching is something that always has to be done, because all event plugins are using their own field structure.

    If another event plugin is not using default timestamps, I don’t see a possibility to successfully import/export events. Sorry.

    Guido

    Thread Starter cutu234

    (@cutu234)

    I don’t understand this, why should importing new events be simple compared to existing events?

    This would save time! We have to create, say, 20 to 30 events per year that are very similar. It would be much faster to modify a spreadsheet and import these data compared to creating each single event via the editor.

    Matching is something that always has to be done, because all event plugins are using their own field structure.

    I didn’t mean matching data from another plugin. I exported an event from VS Event List and changed the data for test purposes. Unfortunately, when importing with WP All Import I had to match the content manually for each and every single event.

    Now, it turned out that the export plugin did a very poor job. The headers simply weren’t right. I switched to this plugin, and everything worked just fine. Unix timestamps can easily be created in the spreadsheet using this formula:

    =(Y2-$F$13)*86400

    Where Y2 is the cell containing the human-readable date and F13 is 01.01.1970.

    It needs some tweaking of the cell formats and the local time. In my case, the dates were formatted like so:
    01.01.2024 10:00
    The unix timestamp was formatted as decimal number.

    post_name (= slug) and ID can be left blank. These values will be created automatically during import. In my case I used the following headers in the spreadsheet. Most cells could be filled by copy/paste.

    post_title
    ID
    post_content
    post_date
    post_name
    post_author
    post_status
    post_format
    comment_status
    ping_status
    post_parent
    menu_order
    event_cat
    event-all-day
    event-date
    event-hide-end-time
    event-link
    event-link-image
    event-link-label
    event-link-target
    event-link-title
    event-location
    event-start-date
    inline_featured_image

    • This reply was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by cutu234.
    • This reply was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by cutu234.
    Plugin Author Guido

    (@guido07111975)

    This would save time! We have to create, say, 20 to 30 events per year that are very similar. It would be much faster to modify a spreadsheet and import these data compared to creating each single event via the editor.

    Got it now! Misunderstood this earlier.

    Unix timestamps can easily be created in the spreadsheet using this formula:

    Did not know this, thanks!

    Hopefully now everything goes as expected for you..

    Guido

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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