We're excited to announce the release of WP All Import 3.2.
Import Files With Special Characters Easily
Now you can choose the character set of your file during the import process if WP All Import is unable to automatically detect it.
You can preview the way your post content will look with different character sets to find the one that works for your file.
If you were importing files with broken special characters and you had to use PHP functions in your template to fix them you don't have to do that any more. If you were using the "auto-fix" option in WP All Import you don't have to do that any more.
Import Image Meta Data
We improved the Featured Image/Media Gallery import interface, and added the ability to set image meta data - title, caption, alt text, and description. You can also specify the name to use for the image files instead of using the original image file name.
More Easily Merge Data Across Multiple Feeds
Let's say you've imported products from one file and want to update their prices using another file.
We improved the Keep Custom Fields option of WP All Import to allow you to only update the fields you specify.
Improved UI
WP All Import uses less JQuery UI and now looks more like the rest of the WordPress dashboard. We also re-organized some things to make the UI look a bit nicer.
On the Manage Imports page Update has become Re-Run Import and Use New File has become Re-Run Import With New File.
Performance Improvements
WordPress scheduling logic was very slow. We displayed a warning saying "Don't use this for large imports." but now we've decided to remove it entirely. It was slowing down everyone's sites, not just those that had it enabled, because the plugin has to check if it is enabled or not. Going forward, to schedule an import, use a cron job, as per the Cron Scheduling page.
Other minor performance enhancements were also made.
Easily Import Variations Using the WooCommerce add-on
Along with WP All Import 3.2 we are releasing version 1.1 of the WooCommerce add-on.
We've made importing variations very simple in 1.1 of the WooCommerce add-on.
Six options are provided for variation imports. Four options have example data to go with them, and has instructions explaining exactly what you need to do to get your variations linked together if your feed contains variations only without parent products, or your variations linked to your parent products.
Lots of bug fixes.
Lots of bugs that only affected very specific use cases have been fixed.
