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There are many reasons to create content programmatically. One of them could be having a new site with a small amount of users. In this case, site owners need to ask and answer their own questions in order to generate content. This process can be bothersome and slow using a web interface.

This is a very common situation most communities face when they are starting from scratch. Bulk Content Generator is a plugin that eases the process of creating content on sites. In short, it allows users to import a spreadsheet that contains questions, answers or comments and turn them into real posts in the site. It is also possible to configure the creation date of the posts (so that they don't look like they were created all in the same day) as well as the user who created them, among many other things.

Plugin features include:

  • Create questions, answers and comments taken from a file
  • All posts can be set an author or be anonymous
  • Questions can be set a category, tags and the Q2A extra value, if configured in the site
  • Answers can be selected
  • Ability to disable notifications on the created posts (to avoid any future email)
  • Ability to disable notifications while creating the posts (to avoid emails only while creating the posts)
  • All posts can be set a particular creation date in the past or it can even be generated randomly
  • Work is split into batches and progress is updated after processing each batch
  • Administrators can select what user levels can perform imports

If you are interested in reading more about the plugin you can check the plugin page. There, you'll find some additional features, screenshots and how to order it. You can also find a plugin demo here.

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I was looking for this & started with small code base...
But got this by you just in time :) thanks for your efforts. It saved lot of time...
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Very helpful plugin! is this working for v1.8 also?
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Seen plugin page, it support v1.8.
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@pupi1985, do you see any issue with this plugin if Option1:  db setup is used for multiple site and then this plugin is used for content upload?

http://question2answer.org/qa/56605/q2a-on-main-and-subdomain-with-single-user-base
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The plugin should work fine. Each site will have its own posts table. Each site will share the same users table. Each site will not even know of the existence of other sites so the plugin itself won't know that either.
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@pupi1985, Ok, thanks!
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Whenever new question is imported using this plugin it increments the url id by 10. why ?
This will create a very big number even if I import several hundred questions.
I have checked this on demo site.
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I guess you got to that conclusion after checking my demo site. The MySQL instance in my demo site is configured to increment the AUTO_INCREMENT `postid` column by 10. This even happens if you just ask a question in the site normally. So it has nothing to do with the plugin
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is this plugin still working? i'm interested in could you please give me access to a demo website where i could see how it works, already make a registration in the link you provide but cannot see where to get the plugin.

Thanks in advance
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The plugin still works. All your other concerns have all been addressed in the post. Please, re-read it to find the answers. Thanks.
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Thank you for this wonderful plugin already purchased a copy this week and its amazing how it works, i got a question about duplicate content does the plugin detect duplicate questions or answer ?? Didnt try it but i would like to know how it treats that kind of data if a question is already on the website and the new import xls file has also this same question.

Thanks
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In short, the plugin does not look for "duplicate content". However, it allows to rollback a full import process. In other words, if something goes wrong or generates an unexpected result, almost all traces of the last import can be removed.

I think your question makes sense and probably, feature-wise, there could be some kind of checkbox that could add some extra steps before posting. However, that complicates things more than it seems. Some potential issues:

 * Would two questions with the same title considered duplicate content?
 * Would two questions with the same title and the same content but, the content differs in a single character be considered?
 * Why would the plugin check for duplicate content while Q2A doesn't? (Note it only checks for duplicate content for specific posts, such as the latest 5 posts site-wise)
 * Checking for duplicate titles and content will need additional indexes that Q2A does not support. Otherwise, the process would be very slow (and even with the indexes, the process would go slower because of these additional checks)

My conclusion is that unless there is a strong need of this feature (e.g. I receive that same request from many people) it is better to consider it as a no-go
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Thanks for your reply, another question please about csv format which can be imported, already tried importing csv file with ; separator but with no luck. ca we get a sample csv file format which is compatible with please.
Regards
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+1
A Comma Separated Values file is not a file that ends with a ".csv" extension but rather a file that has values separated by commas. Semicolons are not commas.
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got it, i found the right csv format to import into the plugin, but it's limited to 1000 post per import even if the file got more entries.
is there a limitation in import ??
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There is no limit. Please, if you require support use the Issues section, as explained in the wiki page of the plugin
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Hi,
 Already purchased your plugin but i have an issue importing data without categoryid, i got this error message when trying to validate the file :

Errors found while validating the file
Error in line 2: No CategoryId or CategoryUrl have been input and the site requires a category per question
Error in line 6: No CategoryId or CategoryUrl have been input and the site requires a category per question
Error in line 10: No CategoryId or CategoryUrl have been input and the site requires a category per question

for information in Q2A CMS i can post a question without categories only using question, tag , why do the plugin keep asking me for categorieid ??
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Please, follow the steps explained in the Support section of the wiki: https://bitbucket.org/pupi1985/q2a-bulk-content-generator-public/wiki/Home#markdown-header-support

In your case, I will suggest to also include the .json file generated with this plugin: https://github.com/pupi1985/q2a-pupi-coma

4 Answers

+2 votes
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I liked this plugin very much! almost all required features are there in this plugin. Great work, keep it up!

> Upgrade system support: The plugin will be able to properly upgrade from previous versions

what does this mean?

Does this plugin add any entry related to this plugin in database?
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Thank you. That is mostly focused on DDL changes required when upgrading. There are some plugins that require creating tables and new versions of those plugins might need to add/remove/modify existing fields or tables. All plugins I write handle versioning of the database (in a similar way as how the core does) so any new versions will detect the old database version and upgrade the database, without the need to ask the user to go to PHPMyAdmin and run some queries.

In this particular case, the plugin does not create any table or perform any DDL change to the existing tables. So it could be useless to say so but the end user does not know this so in order to avoid any questions about support for future releases I tried to make it clear that future versions handle the upgrade on their own. Probably, I should rephrase that :)
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Thank you for the details. Good to know it is not adding any additional tables or making changes in db.

btw, any discount for earlybirds :)
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+1
You are genius  man @pupi
+1 vote
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edited by

Good plugin - I liked this plugin very much! 

0 votes
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Hi pupi. Id like to know if this plugin is working with q2a latest version and if it

1. creates new users or can be added to random users (without choose one by one)

2. populates only the posts table

tnks!
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Hi.

 0. Yes, the plugin works with the following Q2A versions (as explained in the wiki): 1.7.*, 1.8.*
 
 1. This is explained in the wiki. In short, the plugin does not create new (fake) users. Assigning posts to random users seems to be odd because non-fake users would get posts created out of the blue. The safest approach would be to post anonymously. Regarding user creation, there is another plugin that can be used for that. You could create the users with that plugin and then assign them manually to the import file. I'm open to suggestion to this item.

 2. It creates whatever is needed to create a post. For example, if tags are needed, they are created, if new words are added, they are created, etc.
0 votes
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Can I have an example of a file to import? Here https://bitbucket.org/pupi1985/q2a-bulk-content-generator-public/wiki/Home is not very clear. And yet, as I understand it, he does not create users, they must be already in advance. And also what about the graphics?
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* Regarding the sample file: please, read the wiki carefully. In there, you can see I do provide a link to one
 * Regarding user creation: the plugin does not create users. If you want to create users, you can use a plugin to create users, such as this one: https://github.com/thisliquidspace/q2a-user-import
 * Regarding image creation: the plugin does not create images. The plugin expects ALL post content to be generated by you beforehand. In other words, the plugin expects the HTML to have <img> tags linking to images that you have previously created (either in Q2A or anywhere, anyhow on the Internet)
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