philipt18

Thank you for your effort. I really appreciate it. I will definitely test it as soon as possible.

One other bit of help, what is the list of fields that are reserved, like title, url, author, etc. that can be used? Also, is it confusing that the [field] short code is used both for custom fields and for reserved fields? or am I misunderstanding what is happening?

I thought perhaps something like this might work, but it ends up blank:

<ul>
	[pass field1="tag_list" field2="url" field3="title"]
		[loop type="post" category="article" tag="{FIELD1}"]
			<li><a href="{FIELD2}">{FIELD3}</a></li>
		[/loop]
	[/pass]
</ul>

I’m guessing I’m calling the title and URL wrong, but I’m not sure how to do it correctly.

I’m guessing that the answer is to use the [pass] short code to pass the parameter to a [loop]. How do I output the title of the post and more importantly the link to the post? Where is the list of pre-defined content that one can access, and example of using them? Thank you.

I’m beginning to think perhaps it has something to do with the server running PHP 5.2.x. Does the new version of GCE require 5.3.x?

I think it’s more than a theory, but it’s a bit more complicated. I got things working, but the import page was always timed out. Finally, the last import which had less than 20 records, finished properly and showed the results of the import. I think there are two things going on here:

1) When there are missing images, perhaps it takes more than one, for some reason a second (or even third) copy of CSV is loaded and duplicate posts imported.

2) When the entire process takes too long, the import page times out, but that doesn’t seem to effect the import process.

I don’t know where the cutoff is for the timeout, probably somewhere between 25 and 50 imports that have thumbnails. It could also have to do with the size of the images used as thumbnails. I’m using ~1200 pixel wide images that I extracted from PDFs using Imagemagick. The files tend to be between 250-500KB.

I also have no idea what triggers the duplicate CSV files. It’s possible that it has to do with the size of the thumbnail files or some other random factor. Although I could guess where it happened (by the sequence of ID numbers of created files) I didn’t actually pay much attention to that when I was trying to get things working, and didn’t record which files came before and after the creation of duplicate CSV files.

That’s about all I can say right now as the posts I was working on are now all imported. I’ll likely need to do more in the future, but not too soon. I hope my observations help pinpoint what is going wrong, and will help improve the plugin in the future.

Okay, it’s just a theory, but I noticed in the last CSV file that some of the locations of the thumbnails were wrong. Basically I changed some filenames and didn’t update the CSV. Is it possible that RSCI is doing too much work when it can’t find an image, and that is triggering the problem here? Unfortunately, in the past one of the attempts worked even when some of the files were missing, so this isn’t necessarily the answer.

Even so, perhaps it might be useful to do a check for the existence of the image file before trying to import it, if you don’t already. I’ll do some more testing to see what I can determine.

Hmmm. Got triple posts on the next attempt. Would appreciate additional suggestions.

Tried again and at one point there were actually 3 CSV files. It actually generated triple (150) posts this time instead of just double.

Increased max execution time to 1200. Ran a CSV with 50 posts and it worked. I guess that was the problem. It still gives me an Error 520 at the end of the process, however. Not sure what the effect of leaving such as long execution time in my php settings will do, although I guess I can shorten it after I finish importing my posts.

That helped. I ran a csv with 50 items and it worked. I then ran another 50, and I saw a small problem. 9 out of the 50 posts didn’t get their thumbnails imported. It turns out I had the wrong filenames in the csv for those posts, so it’s my fault, but I bring it up because there were no error messages when the csv was processed. If a thumbnail can’t be found it would be very helpful to see some kind of error message.

Unfortunately, when I tried to import another 50 after I fixed the 9 posts without thumbnails, I ran into the duplicate csv problem again and got about 90 posts before I cancelled it.

No, I didn’t. How would that cause duplicate CSV files and imports? It’s currently set to 120 seconds. I’ll set it to 240 and see what happens, but any other ideas of what might cause this to occur?

Thanks.

I realized that in attempts 8 and 9 the Cloudflare development mode had expired. There’s also some kind of caching mode on my host that I didn’t remember to turn off. Not sure what exactly it does, but it has a specific mode for WordPress caching, which I turned off.

10) Ran the third 25-row csv in firefox again, and while I still got the Error 520 at the end, everything seemed to be imported properly.

11) Ran another 25-row csv file in the same way, but this time got 50 posts and images. That’s annoying since there was no difference between these two attempts.

9) Tried a CSV with 25 records in firefox. Generated 50 posts and 50 attached images. No CSV files left unattached like last time. Perhaps they were left last time because the process didn’t finish and this time it did so the CSV were deleted.

8) Tried a CSV with 50 records in Firefox. Generated 56 posts, but it’s not 50 + 6 duplicates, as every record I checked seems to have a duplicate. It’s hard to figure out what is going on. Were 28 records imported and then something went haywire and imported those same records a second time in different order? This is so weird.

Okay, this is interesting. There are two copies of the CSV in the unattached section of the Media Library. Their IDs are 21 apart. There were 56 images, all attached, and two of them, for the same imported item (but different posts), were blank.

Weird, I went back to delete the CSV file from the Media Library and it was not there anymore.