NJ business news publisher
Hundreds of profile pages from one spreadsheet
Influencer lists with more than 700 people, each with a page of their own. Drop in the master spreadsheet and every article is built, formatted, and in order.
The problem
Where the time was going.
This publisher runs influencer lists across a range of categories. Some lists have more than 700 people on them.
Giving every person their own article makes the list easy to share, since honorees and their companies pass their own page around. That means more page views and more revenue. The catch was building hundreds of individual articles by hand, each with the same formatting, headshot, and place in the list.
What we built
The fix.
A WordPress plugin with a five-step wizard: upload the master spreadsheet, map the columns, set the title, author, category, and publish schedule, check the headshots, and run the import.
Every article gets the same layout and the matching headshot from the media library. People are sorted alphabetically, and each article is scheduled a few minutes after the one before, so the list pages through in order.
Re-running an import never creates duplicates, and a missing photo never stops the run. It's listed at the end so it can be added later.
Results
What changed.
A list with hundreds of people goes from spreadsheet to scheduled articles in one sitting.
How it works
Stack and approach, in plain language.
- WordPress plugin
- PHP
- WordPress media library
- Batched imports
- The plugin reads the spreadsheet, cleans up the text encoding, and guesses which column holds which field. The editor confirms the mapping.
- Titles, alphabetical order, and publish times are worked out ahead of time, and each headshot is matched by filename. Any photo can be swapped before the import runs.
- Articles are created ten at a time with a progress bar, so a 700-person list never times out. Each article carries a batch ID and a fingerprint so a re-run skips rows that already exist.
Next step
Got a similar problem?
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