WordPress CSVPig Plugin

One of the tasks I have been doing regularly lately is converting older static HTML websites into WordPress websites. For smaller websites it is not difficult to copy and paste the data into the new WordPress site. The problem is, what do you do with a larger website of a few hundred to a few thousand pages? The very thought of copying and pasting that many pages from plain HTML into WordPress does not thrill me to say the least. Thankfully I have come across the BlogPig CSVPig Import plugin.

BlogPig makes several WordPress automation plugins, some of which could be seen as more on the darker side of blogging, but CSVPig is a tool that is badly needed to help import data into WordPress. It does pretty much exactly what you would expect it to do, it imports a CSV file into WordPress.

You can choose to create post or pages, create different templates depending on what you are importing and even schedule the posts to be published at some future date.

Now, you might be wondering how I use BlogPig CSVPig to import static HTML files, well it is pretty easy actually. I wrote a PHP script that takes a list of URL’s processes the page and saves the content into a CSV file. It helps that I created many of the sites that I am converting so I can make sure the HTML structure is consistent. I won’t post my script because there is a potential to use it to scrape a site.

You can also use BlogPig CSVPig for creating many other sites. I have seen it used to create affiliate based sites using merchants datafeeds. You could use it to create your own store or even to manage your own website using a spreadsheet if you are more comfortable using spreadsheet software.

For now I have found BlogPig CSVPig very useful to help clients transition from basic HTML based websites to a WordPress powered site where they have more control over their website and information.