Convert Existing Posts to Reviews

Hello,

Right now that is not a feature of the plugin, as I can’t come up with a fool-proof way to handle grabbing the different areas of a review that would work for everyone.

Can you provide me with a link to your site to see how you have structured your review.

Warning: You’re about to be inundated with romance novel reviews.

Here is the link: https://historicalromance.love/category/blog-categories/book-reviews/

Note: the site is under construction and not released yet so not everything links everywhere yet. The reviews were imported from a different wordpress site. I’m currently using custom fields to populate some information for the book reviews. But not all of it is linked yet. Some posts don’t have titles yet or ratings yet, for example.

This post is complete: https://historicalromance.love/ten-kisses-to-scandal-by-vivienne-lorret/

Hello again,

I should be able to write a little plugin that converts regular posts to a review but I’ve never attempted it before, so I would need to run some tests.

Can I assume that all your review posts are in the “Book Review” subcatory of the main “Blog Categories” category?

Blog Categories
  |
  |-- Book Review

Would there be a way to update an existing review as post format “review?”

I notice that you have a “review” button when creating or editing a post, which leads to a search form and an option to create a new review and return. I’d rather not duplicate effort, if just the most common elements can be brought into a “review” format.

Hello @ginnyred57

I have started working a solution for this but after reading your post, you have given me a better idea on how to implement this feature.

@ginnyred57’s comment made me think. I was able to export my posts from one wordpress page into this page. Would it be possible to export them again and just upload them up into your review section? Not sure how that would translate, but maybe easier than “converting” them?

@w33zy Oh sorry. I didn’t answer your other question. My reviews are indeed in the Blog Categories>Book Reviews subcategory.

@hollyperret

Here is what I was thinking after reading @ginnyred57 post…

Instead of trying to convert your posts in mass to reviews, I could add a new link called “Convert” to the admin posts table. Clicking it will convert that single post to a review.

My reasoning for this method is that converting 100+ posts at once will easily bog-down most blogs on shared hosting and possibly cause timeouts which can mess up the blog’s post data. Plus, this way, it is way easier to revert a review back to a post, just in case.

The only downside is that you would have to click the link for each post, individually.

@w33zy That sounds about perfect to me! We have a front end form that people fill out to add book reviews. So that would mean I could keep that in place and just click convert. I don’t mind having to do it one by one, especially since I have to go into them to approve them anyway.

@hollyperret In the review example you have linked, are the items such as Rating, Plot/Storyline, Feels, Romance, etc., stored as postmeta or is just part of the WP post content?

@w33zy A few different answers apply.

The rating line is actually a separate field that I created using the “ratings” widget in elementor. It points to a custom field with a 1-5 number in it that is submitted when people add a book review. The other emojis are just copied into the body of the post text area.

The book title, book author, and amazon link that loads when clicking on the picture or title displayed on the page are set up the same way.

There is also a category that I select with the rating in it so people can access a list of books based on rating from the menu.

I suspect you wont be able to set it up to transfer the custom fields, but that is understandable. It would be great if I could keep the categories though.

You’re awesome for doing this. Thank you! If you have a donate link for your site, please send it over. I would be happy to support your development.

I’ll send you a extension for Recencio to try tomorrow. The donate link is at https://paypal.me/wzymedia

This would be a good solution for me as well, since I don’t have that many posts to convert.

I was able to use the workaround for an acceptable option but it’s a bit awkward remembering to create a review first. This is the third or fourth plugin I’ve tried and once figuring out your page name convention it seems quite smoot.

@hollyperret Could you try this plugin and tell me how it works for you? After you have installed and activated the plugin, go to the Recencio extensions page and activate the “Convert Posts to Reviews” extension.

Now when you are on the WP admin posts table you should see a “Convert” link below the post’s title on hover. Click the link and it should move the post from posts table to the reviews table. Now in the reviews admin table you should see the converted post.

https://gitlab.com/w33zy/rcno-posts-to-reviews

@w33zy Sorry for the delay in my response. I’ve had a deadline at work and couldnt come back to this until now.

I installed it and it seems to work beautifully! That is astoundingly simple. Thank you so much for doing that. I am going to play around for a while. I may come back with more questions lol

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by hollyperret.