Multiple bylines from College Publisher

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Matthew Gerring

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Nov 2, 2011, 5:08:36 AM11/2/11
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Hi guys,

I'm importing a MASSIVE archive from College Publisher going back to about 1999. The stewards of older Spartan Daily websites, to skirt the limitations of old College Publisher versions, just put everyone's byline in a text field if there were multiple authors.

I already managed to streamline the import process by searching for an existing author based on the author's display name, and I have that working remarkably well, so I no longer have to manually map an entire import file's worth of authors to their existing duplicates in the database. 

So far, the best solution I've some up with for multiple bylines is to just choose the first name and lop off the rest, but that's some hack shit. It's easy enough to split a string on "and" or "&" and find each author individually.

The problem is, WordPress isn't set up by default to handle multiple authors. I'm using Co-Authors Plus, and adding multiple authors programmatically isn't difficult, but hacking the WordPress importer to do it for me is.

Has anyone dealt with this before? And would anybody like to use my version of the WordPress importer that automatically maps an author's display name to its closest match in the database on the import screen? I can't imagine I'm the only person who has had this problem.

Thanks for any help,
Matthew

Daniel Bachhuber

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Nov 2, 2011, 1:43:16 PM11/2/11
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Hey Matt,I've found that trying to do author mapping or any sort of
user lookup on import really doesn't scale, especially after you get
past 500 users. WordPress isn't optimized for it.
Because you don't want this to hang up your import process, what I
would personally do instead is store the author data as a custom field
and write a post-import script to clean the data and set up your Co-
Authors. This is advantageous also in that you can make a backup after
you've done the import and have something to revert to as your
cleaning the author data.
Cheers,
Daniel
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