Import thousands of pages into Cornerstone

[gracelinks]

I need to migrate ~2,000 flat HTML pages into a WordPress site using X Theme.

I could build a single example of a page in Cornerstone, then use the wp_post database record as a template, writing a script to swap out the titles, content, images. Then it’s just a SQL statement to insert.

However, looks like a lot of the Cornerstone content is stored in wp_postmeta. Is this relationship defined anywhere?

I’m assuming you don’t have a content import tool, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Can you provide some guidance on the best way to import this content? Happy to write my own scripts but I need to understand better the relationship between the two tables.

I could import them as regular WordPress content but I hate to force the content editors to use Cornerstone for some pages and the default WordPress WYSIWYG for others.

Thanks for any assistance.

[christopher]

Hi there,

The main content of the Cornerstone is stored in the post table. For example, I have a main page with the ID of 834:

Besides the main content, Cornerstone has additional information such as generated Styles or additional settings that are stored in the post_meta table.

To be able to find the meta information of the page you should have the ID of the page. Here are the Cornerstone related table entries in post_meta for my case:

As you can see there is a post_id column that has the same ID of their page in question (834).

Also, the X theme itself adds extra information in the post_meta have for the page. The data is usually whatever you set in the page setting such as sliders above the Masthead and so on:

We cannot help you write such a script unfortunately, but I wonder if our new template manager might be of any help:

https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/managers-templates/20364

The feature is not available yet and it will be released in the upcoming update.

Thank you.

[gracelinks]

Thanks @christopher.amirian for such a thoughtful and detailed response, this is super helpful.

So looks like the only record in wp_post_meta that I’ll need to customize for my SQL import would be the _cornerstone_data record?

E.g., let’s say 2,000 of these are “article” pages. I build 1 as an example in Cornerstone. Then I take the wp_post record and wp_postmeta records and use them as a template, writing a Python or PHP script that swaps out the relevant text content where necessary and inserts them into the DB.

Does that battle plan sound reasonable to you? I was totally unfamiliar with Cornerstone until recently so I just wanted to check with you before I got too far down the rabbit hole and had to take a different approach.

Thanks again for your assistance.

[christian]

Hey @gracelinks,

Yes and one thing to note is Cornerstone data is stored as serialized data so you need to take that into account.

Thanks.