Set additional field values for WordPress

Introduction

Cloudpress allows you to set additional field values when exporting content to WordPress. This document gives you more information on the WordPress fields that Cloudpress support.

Please refer to the Export additional fields to your CMS documentation for information on specifying the values when exporting from Google Docs and Notion.

Standard fields

The tables below list the standard WordPress fields that Cloudpress currently supports. The Field name columns list the names of the fields. The Type column defines the type of value that Cloudpress expects for the field. The Supported In column indicates whether the field is supported in posts, pages, or both. The Description column gives more information about the purpose of the field and possible values.

Field name	Type	Supported In	Description
author	Text	Posts, Pages	The ID or username of an existing user in WordPress.
categories	Text	Posts	The ID or name of an existing category in WordPress. If you specify a numeric value (e.g. 21), Cloudpress will try to find the category by its ID. If you specify a text value (e.g. China), Cloudpress will try to find the category by its name. You can specify multiple categories using a semicolon (;) as a delimiter, for example, China; Travel.
comment_status	Text	Posts, Pages	Specifies whether comments are allowed on the post. Possible values are open or true if comments are allowed, or closed or false when comments are not allowed.
date	Text	Posts, Pages	The date for the post. See the section below on date formats.
excerpt	Text	Posts, Pages	The excerpt for the post.
featured_image	Image	Posts, Pages	An image to serve as the featured image for the blog post.
ping_status	Text	Posts, Pages	Specifies whether pings and trackbacks are allowed on the post. Possible values are open or true if comments are allowed or closed or false when comments are not allowed.
slug	Text	Posts, Pages	The slug for the post.
status	Text	Posts, Pages	The status of the post/page. Possible values are publish, future, draft, pending, or private.
sticky	Text	Posts	Specifies whether the post should stick to the top of the blog. Possible values a true or false.
title	Text	Posts, Pages	The title of the post. By default, Cloudpress uses the title of the source document for the title, but you can override it by supplying a value for this field.
tags	Text	Posts	The ID or name of an existing tag in WordPress. If you specify a numeric value (e.g. 21), Cloudpress will try to find the tag by its ID. If you specify a text value (e.g. China), Cloudpress will try to find the tag by its name. You can specify multiple tags using a semicolon (;) as a delimiter, for example, China; Travel.

Date formats

You can specify a date using just the date, the date with a time, or the date with a time and time zone specifier. The table below gives examples of each of these, along with an explanation.

Text value	Date	Explanation
2023-02-27	Midnight (GMT) on 27 February 2023	The date format is YYYY-MM-DD. If no time is specified, the time will be assumed to be midnight GMT.
2023-02-27T13:45	1:45 PM (GMT) on 27 February 2023	Time can be specified by appending the T specifier to the date along with the time in HH:MM format. Time is specified using a 24-hour clock.
2023-02-27T13:45-05:00	1:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time/EST) on 27 February 2023	You can add a time zone offset by adding a + or - and the offset in HH:MM. For example, -05:00 indicates Eastern Standard Time. As another example, if you want to specify the time in Indochina Time, you can use +07:00.

Custom fields

Cloudpress allows you to set custom fields, but since Cloudpress is, in most cases, unable to validate that the field names and values you supply are correct, it is up to you to ensure to specify the correct field names and values.

Custom fields values also have the following requirements:

1. The custom fields must support updating via the WordPress REST API. Most custom field plugins support this, but you need to refer to their documentation.
2. Since Cloudpress cannot determine the underlying field type, Cloudpress can only update text values. The underlying custom field value must support setting its as a text representation.

By default, Cloudpress does not allow setting custom field values. Before you can update custom fields, you need to enable custom fields by going to your WordPress connection’s Export Settings tab and selecting the option to enable custom fields. The field name you specify will depend on how custom fields require updating via the REST API. For example, for Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin requires you to pass the custom fields inside an acf object when sending updates via the REST API.

To demonstrate this, suppose you add a custom field named country with the ACF plugin and want to update the value to “Thailand”. When updating this field, Cloudpress must send the following JSON update via the WordPress REST API:

{
  "acf": {	"country": "Thailand"}
}

Since you cannot specify a nested structure like this when specifying the field name and value, you can use a period (.) to separate the different parts of the nested structure. For example, to update the country field created by ACF as described above, you must specify the property name in the property table in Google Docs as acf.country, as per the screenshot below. Let’s look at how you can create and update custom fields using some of the most common custom fields plugins.

Using Cloudpress with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

Add the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin to your WordPress site. Create a new field group and add a field with the field name country. Scroll down to the group settings and make sure that you enable the “Show in REST API” toggle, then save your changes. To update custom fields created with ACF, you need to use acf.[field name] as the name of the field. For example, if you use a property table in Google Docs, you can update the country field created above by using the name acf.country in the property table.

Using Cloudpress with Meta Box

Add both the Meta Box plugin and the MB Rest API plugin. The MB Rest API plugin exposes custom fields you create with the Meta Box plugin via the WordPress REST API, allowing Cloudpress to update those fields. For this example, I will create a country custom field via code (as per their documentation):

add_filter( 'rwmb_meta_boxes', function ( $meta_boxes ) {
    $meta_boxes[] = [
        'title'      => 'Extra details',
        'post_types' => 'post',
        'fields'     => [
            [
                'name' => 'Country',
                'id'   => 'country',
                'type' => 'text',
            ],
        ],
    ];
    return $meta_boxes;
} );

To update custom fields created with Meta Box, you must use meta_box.[field id] as the name of the field. For example, if you use a property table in Google Docs, you can update the country field created above by using the name meta_box.country in the property table.