WordPress Batch Create Plugin

Need to create hundreds or thousand of site and users all at once? Or add lots of users to a site quickly?

Maybe you’re setting up accounts for an entire University, or maybe you’re creating a huge network on a heap of different topics or maybe you’re just a sp…. [ed - don't say it!]

Seriously though, there are many legitimate reasons to automate the creation of site and users, and for adding lots of users to a site quickly – and this plugin serves precisely that purpose.

Packed full of features such as:

Batch create new users and/or sites
Batch add users to existing sites
Ability to assign user roles
Choice of preset or auto-generated passwords
Supports use of both Excel and .csv batch files
xls template for creating the batch file
Cool status bar to display progress as batch file being processed
Automatic alert if email address used in batch file for more than one username

Check it out!

Simply install and activate the plugin and you’ll see a new ‘Batch Create’ menu below Settings in your network admin dashboard.

Settings > Batch Create in network admin dashboard

Now Super Admiin users can batch create new sites, new users and add users to existing sites as simply as uploading a .xls or .csv file.

Uploading to batch create

Your file just needs to contain site URLs, site titles, username, user role and user passwords (yes, you can set passwords with this too :)

And creating the batch file is as simple as downloading the .xls template, following the instructions in header row of the .xls file and uploading.

Using the Batch Create template

Here are some examples of how you can use it:

Create user with site and preset password with a default role
Create user with site and auto-generated password with default role
Create user without a site with a preset password
Add user to an existing site with default role

And it is as simple as using Excel!

Example of Batch create options

Neato? Heh!

Start by reading Installing plugins section in our comprehensive WordPress and WordPress Multisite Manual if you are new to WordPress Multisite.

To install:

1. Download the plugin file
2.Unzip the file into a folder on your hard drive
3. Upload /batch-create/ folder to /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your site
4. Visit Network Admin -> Plugins and Network Activate it there.

Note: If you have an older version of the plugin installed in /mu-plugins/ please delete it.

That’s it! No configuration necessary!

To Use:

A new menu item called Batch Create should appear under the Settings navigation menu in the network admin dashboard once the plugin has been network activated.

It is designed for quickly creating sites and/or usernames or adding users to an existing site in batches of 10′s, 100′s or 1000′s by uploading a .xls file or .csv text file.

1. Go to Settings > Batch Create in the network admin dashboard

2. Download the template file by clicking on the ‘this .xls’ link

3. Follow the instructions in the header row of the .xls template file to replace your site and users details with the provided examples.

4. Save your batch file as Excel 97-2003 or a .csv file.

5. Now upload and process your batch file.

Using Batch Create

Some Facts About Batch Create

The easiest option for creating your batch create file is to use Excel and save it as a Excel 97-2003 Workbook
It needs to be written in this order –Site Name,Site Title, username, password, user email and user role
Each new user must be on a separate row and each of a users details in a new column
WordPress doesn’t allow multiple user to have the same email address
When the system encounters an error creating a user in the batch file, the error log will be updated and all other processing will stop. That way the admin can go through the batch file and correct the problematic entry

Site Name

The name of the site you want created or the user added to (if that site already exists).
If you do not want the user to have a site, please set this to ‘null’ without the quotation marks.
This will be part of the URL for the site (ex. site_name.myblogs.org or myblogs.org/site_name)
You can only use lowercase letters and numbers in site URLs (site address). Dots, underscore , characters and spaces in sites URLs aren’t allowed.

Site Title

The title of the site.
This can be changed later in Settings > General in the site admin dashboard

User Name

The login or username of the user.
No spaces allowed. This can’t be changed later.
You can only use lowercase letters and numbers in usernames. Dots, underscore , characters and spaces in usernames aren’t allowed and can result in problems with usernames.

User password

If you would like a password auto-generated please set this to ‘null’ without the quotation marks.
No spaces are allowed in passwords
The user will get an email with the password.

User Email

You must provide a valid email for each user as these are required for functions like password resets, comment notification and deleting sites.
WordPress doesn’t allow multiple users to have the same email address. This means that the email addresses for new users in the batch file should be unique not only in the batch file, but across system too.
Spam filters, especially strict ones for institutional email addresses, may well block username and login information from reaching users. In this case you should recommend users use free webmail accounts that won’t block the emails (such as gmail.com, hotmail.com or mail.yahoo.com)

User Role

The user role (when the user is added to an existing site).
Role can be set to subscriber, contributor, author, editor, or administrator.
If user role isn’t specified they are automatically added as an administrator.
If a new site is being created and the assigned user’s role isn’t administrator the Super Admin will be assigned to the site as an adminstrator

Here are some examples of how you can use batch create:

Using Batch Create