Identifying Importer Posts

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Given a site with 100 posts, where an unspecified number of posts are manually written, and the rest are created using the WordPress importer, how would I programmatically identify the posts imported without having access to remote sites or the original import file?

E.g. was this post created by the Importer tool?

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  1. Two things I could imagine:

    • Check the post_modified value. Maybe import creates a definitive timestamp that you could use. You’ll still have to save the import date somewhere so you can check against it.
    • I do some post importing via a stream/HTTP response (this is not the native importer). During the import, I map my SysBot Plugin user to every post that has no existing user in the installation. This allows me to use archives, filter the admin post list table, etc. A very convenient solution to check those. It also allows posts that get reviewed to get out of the “imported but not touched yet”-queue as the author can change. You might also be able to use the native importer and use the 'import_allow_create_users' with simply setting a callback of __return_false.
    • Infiltrate the WP importer and attach a meta value during import. There’s a hook that triggers for every imported post meta key named 'import_post_meta'.

    In case you’re infiltrating the native importer plugin, you’d need to start at the 'import_start' hook. The last hook in the system (where you might want to check if everything went fine), is the 'import_end' hook.

    EDIT

    I just encountered a class that I’ve not even known that it exists (in core, not the WP Importer plugin): WP_Importer. This class has a method, named get_imported_posts().

    So in theory you could do the following:

    $importer = new WP_Importer;
$importer_name = '???';
$bid = get_current_blog_id();
$imported_posts = $importer->get_imported_posts( $importer_name, $bid );

    The meta key that gets searched for is built by the two meta keys:

    $meta_key = $importer_name . '_' . $bid . '_permalink';

    So there seems to be a unique trace route that one can follow.

    Update #2

    An example query you could run would be:

    var_dump( $wpdb->get_results( "
    SELECT post_id, meta_value 
    FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} 
    WHERE meta_key 
    LIKE '%_permalink%'
" ) );

    This should bring all similar posts up an allow you to determine the “importer_name” easier.

    Edit #3

    There’s get_importers(), which you can dump to see what importers are registered (using register_importer()). This should help identifying the actual importer name.

  2. While I am not aware of import doing anything explicit to mark the posts, the possible indicators are:

    • guid field, if posts weren’t imported from same domain (or some other differentiation)
    • post_id field, which is suggested by import_id during import and can result in possibly detectable block of IDs that are not sequential to natively created ones