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ECI: Categories   

Jul 16th, 2010 // In: Easy CSV Importer, Help // By: Ryan BayneComments 3

Easy CSV Importer can be used to import categories only. There is a Create Categories Early button that allows you to do this without having to configure a project for posts. Soon a project option will be offered on the Start page for creating Categories so that this is clearer.

Hidden Categories, Categories Not Showing In Admin?

There is what seems like a long term issue with WordPress cache where categories are hidden on the Categories page under the Posts menu. It is actually normal, the cache holding categories needs refreshed by taking manual action. All you need to do is manually create a category, the name does not matter. Then delete that category and refresh the page. That should then make all your categories created by the ECI plugin appear.

The first image below shows my categories after post creation. They look like they are all on one level of the hierarchy but it is not the case. The second image shows what happens when I create then delete a category and refresh the page.

The image below shows the real heirarchy as it would be treated by everything else in WordPress. The only issue is how it all shows on the Categories page…

Tutorial Video

Key Information

1. You can currently created up to 3 levels of categories
2. Category splitter currently applies every category ID to the post i.e. 3 categories per post. Category groups allows lets say, only the third category ID to be applied to the post. If you need this ability for the Category Splitter function then please comment below. I do plan to add it but any interest shown will speed this up.
3. The plugin allows you to create multiple category groups i.e. if you had 6 category columns you could use 3 for one group and 3 for another. Your post could also have just 2 categories applied but 6 categories are created per post creation.
4. You do not need to apply all categories in your created group, to your post i.e. each post can have a single category showing in the Edit Post screen once created, possibly the 3rd level (child) category but the plugin would still create the parent and 2nd level categories in order to make the hierarchy.
5. If you are using multiple description columns, you must use them in order starting from the first i.e. you cannot use the 2nd and/or 3rd without using the 1st or it will cause problems.

Features

Main Parent

Feature added 25th August. The images further up this page show a category named “MainParent”. All other categories come under it. It is the new Main Parent feature allows us to do what you see in the images. The effect is that our previous, 3rd level of child categories can now be a 4th level.

In terms of what visitors see and your sites navigation. This allows us to create a single menu item that acts as a directory or area for specific information/products. Previously, all parents would show in the category menus. Some data has a lot of parent categories, menu Easy CSV Importer users have just been accepting that and allowing a list of 30-50 categories which is not great.

Create Category Groups

Use this form to create a group of up to 3 category columns. You can create many groups, allowing you to create many layers of categories. Most people only need to create a single group and for the sake of fast processing please ensure you delete old groups that you no longer need before creating new ones. Two identical groups is simply double the processing. On this form you must make a selection in the menus under Name, these are the columns that should hold your category names. If you want to apply Descriptions you then pair each category levels description column, this is a rare thing to do as most data does not have such a description.

Apply To Post

Not shown on the current screen show is a feature I added after creating this post. It is the Apply To Post column, a list of check-boxes. By leaving them all not checked, no categories would be applied. By checking a single category level, only a single category would be applied to your post. Put a tick in all 3 boxes and every post will have 3 categories assigned. This was added on 7th July 2011.

Three Description Columns

To apply a description to your categories you need a column for each category level that holds description text. You do not need to use all levels, you can apply a description to the first level only if you wish. 16th July 2011 two new menus were added for a 2nd and 3rd part of the description. You can use these to include up to three columns of data in your description. The values in each column will obviously be used in the order selected on this form. A single space will be put between each value. This approach was the easiest to add to the plugin and easiest for people to understand however if you need something else such as designing your description using the tokens approach then please comment below.

Create Categories Early

Easy CSV Importer will easily create categories while creating posts and it must always do  some level of processes regarding categories. Even if you create them early (before starting post creation) using this feature, ECI still needs to check that all categories are created while it creates post so that it can get their ID then apply them. This tool is ideal for testing or if you only want to create categories.

Key Changes

Category Slug Check (12th September 2011)

Category function now checks if a new category exists by searching the slug first. If the slug is not found it then goes on to do what it done before. It will search for the category name with or without any required parent category taking into consideration. I looked at other category creation scripts and they are weak in some ways that Easy CSV Importers scripts were not. At the same time they had strengths ECI did not have. I’m confident the new approach is how it must be done by any plugin. Let me put it another way. A plugin should not work by slug only because there is no assurance that an existing categories slug has not been manually edited. Slim chance, but possible and so the category being searched for will not be found by checking slug only. This does not mean we should go ahead and create it. We need to check if the category name exists, with possibly a slug we don’t expect.

ECI now does that. I’m trying to take my scripts a step further by not assuming too much like other plugins do and provide the settings to make the plugin behave in the way users need. Here is an example. What should the plugin do if an existing category is called “Toys & Games” and a category in your data is “Toys/Games”? I have seen a slash separated value like this to be used as a single category, not 2 categories to be split. I was surprised at such data but the CSV file had 3 columns for categories, each of the 3 columns had single value categories such as “Board Games” or “Dolls” but each column also had many rows that had slash separated values. It got me thinking!

WordPress will create a slug like “toys-games” for Toys & Games but for Toys/Games the slug will be “toysgames”. This is why ECI provides the ability to map category values in data to existing categories. However, it would be easy enough to

Known Issues

Hidden Categories & Wrong Post Count

The hiddencategory issue has possibly been fixed since 12th September 2011. This issue is explained at the beginning of this page because it is a long term WordPress matter. Not really a bug, just the fact that the design around categories was not made for auto-blogging and mass category creation. I made some changes today and all categories now appear however the post count showing how many posts are in each categories is now wrong. Typical! I’m wondering if it is still connected somehow hence why I’m writing it in the same paragraph.

I’m not sure why the counters are not working now, I only use WordPress functions to create categories and posts. I’ve not made changes to post creation that would cause this. So as of 12th September 2011 we may have a slight issue there but I’m sure I will find a way to resolve it. Possibly by forcing a re-count or just creating the query to update the counters manually.