Adds new content as Posts or Pages from an archive of text files. Interesting archives can be found on the support website.
I’ve been using this plugin to add pages to my websites as I convert to WordPress. I find it easy to create text files where the first line of the text file is title of the page and the rest is the content. My procedure was to strip the html from my old static pages leaving just the content. I then zip the file and upload it to the Instant Content directory where the plugin loads the data.
The plugin adds a link to the Pages and Posts menu in order to “Add instant Content”.
The zip files in the plugin directory appear in a drop down box. Select the one to load.
Pages:
Opptionally you can select a parent page for the new content from a dropdown box of all of your existing pages. If you don’t have any pages, the dropdown will not display.
If you like, you can create a new page that will have links to all of your new content. If you type in the title of a new page, that page will be created and updated with links to the new content. The content will be child pages to this new page.
Posts:
You can set a date in the future for posts and an interval for posting. Enter a start date. Then select a frequency such as “every other day” for the interval of postings. Since some of the sample databases are hundreds of entries, so you can have fresh data for years to come.
Important!
There is a small test zip with a few entries for testing and a larger zip of over 300 business letters.
Backup your database first. The sample zips add a whole lot of content and it is a pain to delete them by hand if you don’t like what you get. There may be a bug in WordPress 3.0 that limits the number of trash entries that can be emptied, so please backup your db before adding content that you are not sure that you want.
Don’t add the content twice without getting rid of the old data, this just adds duplicate pages.
You can read about creating your ow zip files at http://www.blogseye.com/instant-content-archive-format/
Download
Latest version: Download Instant Content Plugin v1.1 [zip]
Installation
- Download the plugin.
- Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin.
- In the pages menu click Add Content.
- Select archive file to load and set the options.
- Click the “Add Content” button
FAQ
Changelog
1.0
- initial release – please let me know if you find problems so I can fix them right away.
1.1
- Fixed a bug where Windows systems had trouble finding the zip file. Added custom post types to the mix.
The file gives bad incompatible Archive just letting you know.
yep– the zip is bad
I hope you can tell me if this plug in will do what I am looking to do… (forgive me for being a graphic artist and not coder, I’m probably in over my head, but…) OK, I have just re-designed a small newspaper website and am using wordpress as cms. Our previous host sent me all our 8 years of txt files from the old website. I have created a subdomain (archives dot name-of-site dot com) to hold the old sites articles, which I would like to be searchable. Could I use the same theme as the main site and this “Instant Content Plugin”? Would the plug in then allow readers to open the txt file as a post? (I apologize for being so clueless and beg for mercy!)
The plugin will take the text files and load them into wordpress as posts. Afterwards the text file will be the post and you would use wordpress to manage it.
You could load the txt files as pages and make them hierarchical with a directory structure. The plugin will do this.
Another approach would be to make make a template and a simple php progam. The template would load the text files into the template and display them. I have done this with my website http://www.rockfind.com which uses a directory of song lyrics and a template to wrap them.
When I try to use the plug-in, I get a warning “Warning: fread() [function.fread]: Length parameter must be greater than 0″ for each of the files in a zipped file…
Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
The concept of this plug-in is soooo perfect for what I need if I could just get it to work!
I would hire someone to write something, but I don’t even know what kind of person to look for or what to ask.
(I’ve started doing it by hand, about 200 in about 4 hours, but 1000′s more!)
Thank you.
Yes, I am getting the “Warning: fread() [function.fread]: Length parameter must be greater than 0″ error message as well.
Any ideas why?
The only way it would get that is if the zip file is not where it is supposed to be.
I’ll try to debug.
Keith
I released a new version today. I never got the error you describe, but I changed the way that the plugin finds the zip files. I think the current way is more straightforward and less prone to errors.
My thinking is that running php under windows returned a slightly different absolute path format, perhaps even with backslashes. The new version might take care of that, although I can’t test it.
Hello,
Great plugin by the way. I have one issue and I tried to sort it to no avail. If there are any ‘ symbols in my text the articles just off. I tried adding this line $pbody = htmlspecialchars($pbody, ENT_QUOTES); but it didn’t make any difference.
Any ideas?
Thanks
* the articles just cut off that ment to say
Found a solution to the apostrophe problem. Open the text file using notepad++ and change the encoding to UTF8 without BOM. This will fix all special characters during import and will also take care of the beginning marker in the title.