Is there any documentation that you are following?
No all previous links to guidance from the forum have been removed.
Is there a similar example that we can see?
No
What is the link to your site?
hidden link
Hi guys I hope this finds you well.
Long and short we have built a pretty comprehesive directory for a University using Types and Views. We are approaching the finish line and I have come up against something I wans't expecting.
We have populated a few entries in order to build an export file. The main issue being many of the entries appear to be logged in the DB in some kind of funky serialised way I.E we have one option:
Other certification include:
The data coming out of this field is : a:1:{i:0;i:13483;}
Is there some way to make this info legible so we can bulk import? Reason ebing we have in excess of 1000 entries to be populated and manually trying to achieve this is going to take weeks! We are using WP-All Import / Export to run our bulk entries into the system and all we essentially need is a way of instructing the University of laying out their content into a CSV which is legible to them and that we can use to populate the build.
Do you have any guidance on bulk importiung content etc. available?
Some of the Types fields are stored as serialised arrays, which makes importing more complex because the data needs to be processed on import rather than simply copied as-is into the database.
You may be in luck, inasmuch as WP All Import have an add-on for Types which never made it out of beta and is freely available: hidden link
It's their product and I don't know it well, but I expect that part of the integration would have been to handle cases such as this.
You might want to try it and see if it helps.
Otherwise, WP All Import has the ability to pass any imported field through a PHP function so that it can be transformed if needs be before saving.
To help with that, we'd need to know specifically which types of fields you were trying to import that were affected so that we can give you pointers on using the API to manipulate the data as required.
I'm going to take a look at the BETA Addon they have made available (thank you so much for linking this !). If not I will need to explore the php function route. There are several fields which are radio's / checkboxes and ultimately I would like to make the system easy for them to manage in bulk moving forward so either way you have shed a bit of light on what has started as a miserable day.
Looking at the custom fields when they are pulled through to WP All Import am I right in saying that the php functions would basically need to convert say for instance a "certificate name" into the corrisponding number saved against it in the DB ? I.E I have noticed when I look at the data being pulled through to all import, "Awesome Food Certificate" for example is converted to a "3" as that's where it lives in the custom field created?
If I get no joy with the BETA addon I may be back in touch just for a little bit of guidance regarding running things through the php function on import.
Again, thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
