Using XPath to Import Custom Post Meta

Resolved Erin Bell
(@ebellempire)

7 years ago
I started writing this post to request support but, as often happens, I found the answer while putting together my question. Figured I’d share it just in case someone finds it useful.

I have custom postmeta nodes in my XML (see example below) and was having issues importing them. There were dozens of additional nodes I didn’t want and the ones I wanted could be in any position so using something like {wp_postmeta[4]} wouldn’t work consistently for all posts.
```
<wp_postmeta>
  <wp_meta_key>
    _content_author
  </wp_meta_key>
  <wp_meta_value>
    Some name
  </wp_meta_value>
</wp_postmeta>
<wp_postmeta>
  <wp_meta_key>
    _content_author_bio
  </wp_meta_key>
  <wp_meta_value>
    Some bio text
  </wp_meta_value>
</wp_postmeta>
// a bunch of other stuff I don't need ... 
```
I needed to get just the wp_postmeta nodes that contained a wp_meta_key equal to the desired custom field name (in my case, _content_author or _content_author_bio) and then use the wp_meta_value.

So to get these values I entered the following in my import template, using XPath syntax…

{wp_postmeta[wp_meta_key='_content_author']/wp_meta_value}

{wp_postmeta[wp_meta_key='_content_author_bio']/wp_meta_value}

Anyway, maybe this helps someone save a bit of time. Love this plugin.
- This topic was modified 7 years ago by Erin Bell.