Jason Judge

This WordPress plugin imports posts from CSV (Comma Separated Value) files into your 
WordPress blog. It can prove extremely useful when you want to import a bunch 
of posts from an Excel document or the like – simply export your document into 
a CSV file and the plugin will take care of the rest.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer-improved/
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Imports post title, body, excerpt, tags, date, categories etc.</li>
<li>Supports custom fields, custom taxonomies and comments</li>
<li>Deals with Word-style quotes and other non-standard characters using 
WordPress’ built-in mechanism (same one that normalizes your input when you 
write your posts)</li>
<li>Columns in the CSV file can be in any order, provided that they have correct 
headings</li>
<li>Multi-language support</li>
</ul>
This plugin is forked from https://wordpress.org/plugins/csv-importer/ by dvkob 
in order to keep up with changes to the core WordPress.
This importer writes directly to the database. It does not go through the internal 
WordPress objects for creating posts etc. That may be an advantage to you (it will 
be faster for large imports) but do be aware of any data integrity issues that may arrise.
Only UTF-8 encoding is supported, both with and without Byte Order Marks (BOM).
The development repository for this plugin can be found here:
https://github.com/academe/csv-importer-improved
Please feel free to raise issues there, and submit pull requests, as well as through 
the normal WordPress channels.
<h3>Usage</h3>
Click on the CSV Importer link on your WordPress admin page, choose the 
file you would like to import and click Import. The <code>examples</code> directory 
inside the plugin’s directory contains several files that demonstrate 
how to use the plugin. The best way to get started is to import one of 
these files and look at the results.
CSV is a tabular format that consists of rows and columns. Each row in 
a CSV file represents a post; each column identifies a piece of information 
that comprises a post.
You can create new posts, or update existing posts by supplying the csv_post_id 
field pointing to an existing post. When updating, all field names you provide 
in the CSV file will be updated – even if blank – but fields you don’t list at 
the head of the CSV file will be left intact.
<h4>Basic post information</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>csv_post_id</code> – optional, used to update an existing post.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_title</code> – title of the post</li>
<li><code>csv_post_post</code> – body of the post</li>
<li><code>csv_post_type</code> – <code>post</code>, <code>page</code> or a custom post type. 
From 0.3.2, <code>csv_post_type</code> column supports custom post types. 
Refer to the WordPress 
<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Post_Types" rel="nofollow ugc">documentation on custom post types</a> for more info 
on how to set up custom post types.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_excerpt</code> – post excerpt</li>
<li><code>csv_post_categories</code> – a comma separated list of category names or ids. 
The list must be enclosed in quotes, e.g. “EC > UK, Island”. 
If a chain of subcategories does not exist, e.g. <code>Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia</code> 
then they will all be created and the post assigned to the end of the chain. 
The parent category can also be defined using its id, e.g. 
 42 > Primates > Callitrichidae, where <code>42</code> is an 
existing category id.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_tags</code> – a “quoted” comma separated list of tags.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_date</code> – most standard formats are supported. 
For example, <code>now</code>, <code>11/16/2009 0:00</code>, <code>1999-12-31 23:55:00</code>, <code>+1 week</code>, 
 next Thursday, <code>last year</code> are all valid. For technical 
details, consult PHP’s <code>strtotime()</code> function <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php" rel="nofollow ugc">documentation</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Custom fields</h4>
Any column that doesn’t start with <code>csv_</code> is considered to be a custom field 
name. The data in that column will be imported as the custom fields value.
All custom fields must be unique. Multiple fields with the same name will be 
updated to the same value if updating an existing post. 
Prior to version 0.6.0 loading the same field name multiple times to an existing 
post would create multiple custom fields.
<h4>General remarks</h4>
<ul>
<li>WordPress pages <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Pages" rel="nofollow ugc">don’t have categories or tags</a>.</li>
<li>Most columns are optional. Either <code>csv_post_title</code>, <code>csv_post_post</code> or 
 csv_post_excerpt are sufficient to create a post. If all of these 
columns are empty in a row, the plugin will skip that row.</li>
<li>The plugin will attempt to reuse existing categories or tags; if an 
existing category or tag cannot be found, the plugin will create it.</li>
<li>To specify a category that has a greater than sign (>) in the name, use 
the HTML entity <code>&gt;</code></li>
</ul>
<h4>Advanced usage</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>csv_post_author</code> – numeric user id or login name. If not specified or 
user does not exist, the plugin will assign the posts to the user 
performing the import.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_slug</code> – post slug used in permalinks.</li>
<li><code>csv_post_parent</code> – post parent id.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Custom taxonomies</h3>
New in version 0.3.0
Once custom taxonomies are set up in your theme’s functions.php file or 
by using a 3rd party plugin, <code>csv_ctax_(taxonomy name)</code> columns can be 
used to assign imported data to the taxonomies.
Non-hierarchical taxonomies
The syntax for non-hierarchical taxonomies is straightforward and is essentially 
the same as the <code>csv_post_tags</code> syntax.
Hierarchical taxonomies
The syntax for hierarchical taxonomies is more complicated. Each hierarchical 
taxonomy field is a tiny two-column CSV file, where the order of columns 
matters. The first column contains the name of the parent term and the second 
column contains the name of the child term. Top level terms have to be preceded 
either by an empty string or a 0 (zero).
Sample <code>examples/custom-taxonomies.csv</code> file included with the plugin 
illustrates custom taxonomy support. To see how it works, make sure to set up 
custom taxonomies from <code>functions.inc.php</code>.
Make sure that the quotation marks used as text delimiters in <code>csv_ctax_</code> 
columns are regular ASCII double quotes, not typographical quotes like “ 
(U+201C) and ” (U+201D).
<h3>Comments</h3>
New in version 0.3.1
An example file with comments is included in the <code>examples</code> directory. 
In short, comments can be imported along with posts by specifying columns 
such as <code>csv_comment_*_author</code>, <code>csv_comment_*_content</code> etc, where * is 
a comment ID number. This ID doesn’t go into WordPress. It is only there 
to have the connection information in the CSV file.
<h3>Credits</h3>
This plugin uses <a href="http://code.google.com/p/php-csv-parser/" rel="nofollow ugc">php-csv-parser</a> by Kazuyoshi Tlacaelel. 
It was inspired by JayBlogger’s <a href="http://www.jayblogger.com/the-birth-of-my-first-plugin-import-csv/" rel="nofollow ugc">CSV Import</a> plugin.
Contributors:
<ul>
<li>Kevin Hagerty (post_author support)</li>
<li>Edir Pedro (root category option and tableless HTML markup)</li>
<li>Frank Loeffler (comments support)</li>
<li>Micah Gates (subcategory syntax)</li>
<li>David Hollander (deprecation warnings, linebreak handling)</li>
</ul>

CSV Importer Improved

Import posts from CSV files into WordPress.

CSV Importer Improved vs Seraphinite Post .DOCX Source