WP All Import

How to import ACPT meta fields and CCT table records with WP All Import

ACPT has a specific integration with WP All Import, our favorite way to import into WordPress. It ships as an ACPT Add-on box that appears in the import wizard for custom post types, taxonomies, and users, and reads back the XML produced by the WP All Export integration.

Step 1. Import the data

Go to WP All Import and select the XML obtained from the WP All Export tutorial. Select import Movies:

Go straight to Step 3 and drag your data.

Note the ACPT Add-on box, which contains an ACPT meta text field. Drag here the node produced by wpae_acpt_export_all_fields() (or the taxonomy/user equivalent):

Complete the import and every meta field will be present in the imported posts, terms, or users — the same ACPT Add-on box is available regardless of which type you're importing.

Importing CCT table records

The same ACPT Add-on box also has an ACPT table records field. Drag here the XML node produced by wpae_acpt_export_all_table_records() (or the taxonomy/user equivalent, see WP All Export):

On import, ACPT parses the <acpt_table_records> XML and, for every <table> node, looks up the table by name on the target site. The table must already exist there — either created manually with the Table builder, or restored beforehand via Import settings.

A host (post, term, or user) can be linked to at most one record per table — the same constraint that applies in the CCT record editor itself. For each <table> node, ACPT checks whether the target host already has a record there: if so, it's updated in place; otherwise a new record is created and linked to the host via the table's location rule.

The exported <record id="X"> is the source environment's ID and is purely informational — it's meaningless once copied to another install, so the importer ignores it entirely and relies on the host lookup described above instead.

Example

Continuing the Movie/review+specs example from WP All Export: importing the XML below against a Movie with no existing review or specs record creates one new record in each table, linked to the newly imported Movie:

<acpt_table_records belongsTo="customPostType">
  <table name="review">
    <record id="12">
      <column name="author" type="scalar">Jane Doe</column>
      <column name="rating" type="scalar">5</column>
    </record>
  </table>
  <table name="specs">
    <record id="7">
      <column name="runtime_minutes" type="scalar">128</column>
      <column name="aspect_ratio" type="scalar">2.39:1</column>
    </record>
  </table>
</acpt_table_records>

Re-running the same import updates those same two records in place instead of creating duplicates.

Unlike the export side, this field does not check the CCT license/feature flag directly — it simply looks up each <table> node by name on the target site. In practice this means the table must already exist there, which requires CCT to have been enabled when it was created. If a table isn't found, that node is silently skipped and the rest of the import continues.