If you don’t have a collections management system or have some other agnostic source of data (many, many people keep their collections metadata in an Excel spreadsheet for instance) then you can export your data as CSV and import it to your site using the CSV provider.
You just need to take one or two steps to make sure your data fits:
- The first column of your data has to be a unique ID for the record. Something like an accession number is ideal. But – make sure it’s unique as CultureObject will throw a fairly nasty error if there are any duplicates in here!
- The second column of your data will end up being mapped to the title field of your object (i.e the “Title” field you find on all pages and posts of any WordPress site) and thus also the slug for that single object page. You might want to take a moment to think about things like SEO, but in general the name of the object is a reasonably good thing to choose for this. If you have (and you will!) duplicate object names then WordPress will deal with this as it deals with duplicate title / slugs – by adding a number at the end (“some-nice-object-2” for instance).
That’s it! The rest of the columns will be pulled into WordPress as they are and the fields named as per the first row of your data.
Be aware that it is probably better to have nice, short names for fields in your CSV. Not only will this make your data more compact, but it’ll mean when it comes to the display side of things you only have to write cos_get_field(“description”) rather than say cos_get_field(“long web description”) or whatever. The latter will work, but you’ll curse yourself further down the line.