CSV & Pipe-Delimited Files (including keyword-based files)

Files delimited (separated) by commas or pipes (|) are very common and are an ideal solution for posting datafeeds from sources like Commission Junction or Shareasale to your blog. Content Farmer Pro™ greatly simplifies posting datafeeds to your blog by allowing you to create posting templates for each of these types of files.

To use this data file module, you will need to provide a file with at least the following column names (which must be present as the first line of the file):

1. PRODUCTNAME
2. IMAGE
3. DESCRIPTION
4. PRICE
5. ORDERURL

Each row of your should then contain the relevant information in the proper order. Note that that IMAGE field contains a URL to the image.

Additionally, the title of the post will be the value for the first column. In the list above, that would be PRODUCTNAME. Since order doesn't matter in the columns, you could put any value there.

If you get a tab-delimited, fixed-length, pipe-delimited, or CSV file, you'll need to go through some steps to make sure that the file meets the Content Farmer Pro™ format before uploading. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Download your datafeed file from your provider (e.g. Commission Junction, Shareasale, etc.)
2. Open this file using OpenOffice, MicroSoft's Excel, or your favorite spreadsheet editor
3. Delete any non-content columns and any columns not needed for posting.
4. Make sure that a header row (the first row) exists and at least contains the fields listed above - order of the fields does not matter, but the first column is used as the title of the post!
5. Save your datafeed file as a CSV file
6. Upload your data file!

The above holds for the keyword versions as well with one addition: You need to have an additional column with header "KEYWORD". Note that if you put this column as the first column, it will also be used as the title of the post. More than one row can have the same keyword - the module will just choose from among the available options randomly.

The layout modules come with a default layout for your convenience. You can, however, design as many alternative formats as you want and have Content Farmer Pro™ choose one randomly for the layout.

As of Content Farmer Pro, the only way to create layouts is using the Content Editor where you can take full advantage of FCKEditor and all tokens available for your file are provided for drag-and-drop convenience.

The first thing to know when creating a file is how to know what tokens you can use for the values of your CSV file. Content Farmer Pro™ will read the header row, change the name to uppercase, replaces spaces with underscores, prefixes #CSV_, and suffix #. This token is then available for your file. For example, if your header row contained price,product name,product description,price,sale price,saleExpiration Date then the available tokens are #CSV_PRICE#, #CSV_PRODUCT_NAME#, #CSV_PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION#, #CSV_PRICE#, #CSV_SALE#, #CSV_SALE_PRICE#, #CSV_SALEEXPIRATION_DATE#, respectively and the post title is the price since it's the first column listed.

If you were using Content Farmer 1.x and created your custom layouts using the file-based method, they will still be used in CF Pro. However, if you created any custom modules, they will no longer be compatible with CF Pro as the object structure has changed.