Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/programmatically-creating-wordpress-posts-from-csv-data/
As WordPress developers, we often encounter projects that need to include previously attained data, whether that be from simple text files, CSV files, or even an old database. Data migration is something any back end developer will encounter. A few months back, we had a project that needed nearly 1,000 posts to be generated from a plethora of CSV files. Now, usually this wouldn’t be that hard but this data also needed to be under its own post type and that custom post type had a few custom fields, including a media attachment for an MP3 file.
I won’t bore you with the code for creating custom post types and custom fields, because there’s already a ton of articles floating around the web on that subject. I’ll just mention that I am using Custom Post Type UI and Advanced Custom Fields for each respective task. As the title suggests, what we’re going to be covering here is programmatically taking data from a bunch of CSV files (some containing multiple posts), and then turning that data into WordPress posts for a custom post type. We’ll even go over attaching a simple text file to each post.
In order to get all the data we need from the CSV files, we’ll be making use of a few nifty PHP functions, such as: glob(), which ‘globs’ a directory and returns an array of filenames within it; fopen(), which opens up a file so that we can read its contents and finally, fgetcsv(), which parses a CSV file into a nice associative array housing all our data.