When you have installed the plugin you will notice that under the 'Posts' menu an additional menu item shows 'Post from feeds'
Clicking this link will load up the plug-in within the Wordpress admin area. The first time you load the plug-in it will show just one line 'Create a new feed'.
Clicking on the line will open up the 'create new feed' window where you can choose how you want to import your feed, as shown below:
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You can upload a feed from an Upload from your computer, a local file on your server or from a URL or web address. Each type has its advantages:
An upload from your computer means that you can upload at your convenience, or use files where the merchant or feed supplier does not provide URL facilities.
Upload from your local server should be used if you have limits on your web server such as an upload or post limit, this means that you can upload a larger file via FTP or SCP to your server and then give the location of that file to the plug-in.
If you choose upload from URL you will be able to set the plugin to automatically re-download and re-import the file at a given interval. This means that you will be able to create a fully automated site that will keep itself up-to-date.
From Upload |
From Local File |
From URL |
In order to start a project you need to click on one of those options. Each will provide you with a slightly different screen. Each has help on the screen to aid you, but all are very simple.
Each time you add a feed it will ask for a name for the feed, this is just some text that you can refer to the feed by, it is for your reference only.
Once you have sent the datafeed to the plug-in, the screen will update itself and show a new line for the file you have just uploaded. If you upload more feeds you will get many lines here.
You are now ready to start editing the template for that feed. Click on the name of one of the files you have uploaded to open up the options for that feed.
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You can then click on the 'Edit this feed' link which will open up that feeds template in a window.
At the top of the template you will notice that the Wordpress plug-in has now analysed the datafeed file that you uploaded and detected the columns in that file. It has presented those columns to you and assigned a reference to each one. You can use this reference to build up your template.
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You can assign a unique reference to each post which will allow the plugin to update those posts when a new updated datafeed file is uploaded. This is especially important for feeds which have been set to update from a URL.
This field needs to be unique and should usually be set to ID or ProductID or something similar that will uniquely identify each row in the datafeed file.
You can ignore the Advanced Options section for now, if you want more information on those you can read the tutorials relating to their usage.
The Post template section allows you to build up how you want each post created by the plug-in to look. You will notice that you have all the fields you would normally have in Wordpress when creating a post, Subject, Body, Tags, Categories and custom fields.
In order to build the template you enter the reference of the field where you want that text to appear. So if the 'Product Name' is in #1# and you want that as the subject simply enter #1# in the subject.
The rest of the fields follow the same pattern; simply add the reference where you want the test to show. You can include your own text as well so if you enter Price: #7# for example, this will show as 'Price: £4.50' when the post gets created.
Tags and Categories can be used in the same manner, if your datafeed has a field that contains category, or sub-category you can use this to create a category in Wordpress. Enter the reference in the field, if you have multiple fields you want to create tags and categories from you can do so by separating them with a comma.
You can also use static text in the categories and tags, so for example if you have a datafeed that contains cars, where the make column is #4# and engine size is #7# you could have #4#, #7#, Family Cars so each post will be created in three categories, these will be 'Ford, 1.8 Petrol, Family Cars' for example.
If you want to create links or add images please see the small tutorials explaining how that can be done.
Once you are happy with the template click the ‘Process File’ button at the bottom of the window. This will then process the file. Depending on how large your datafeed file is (how many rows and columns it has) and depending on how complex your template this may take a few minutes to process, however, once it has done so it will show you a message at the top of the screen, 10,242 posts created.
Well done! Your site is now up and running!
You can now create another project importing a different datafeed with a different table by starting this process again. Each time you do so, a new row will be created in the Multifeed manager.