Re: Importing data from Excel, CSV sheet
@wordpresschina – Thanks so much for your work on this, and especially for sharing your work on the forum. Very glad you were able to make it (mostly) work.
When I built the plugin, I didn’t make any effort to differentiate between different kinds of profile fields (checkboxes vs radio buttons vs text boxes etc). It’s impossible to get this info merely from the Ning export (at least, the old style CSV export), so it would require prompting the importing admin for each new field. Not impossible, but it required a lot of coding that I didn’t want to do because I wanted to get the dang thing out there so people could use it 
I’m hopeful that the upcoming Ning network exporter will produce more robust data that will allow easier, and more fine grained, imports into BP.
Whether that can be expanded to more general CSV imports will always be a tricky issue. Ideally, an importer would be designed to handle a generic import format, so that importers for new formats would only have to convert to this standard format – all the BP-specific stuff would be done with the all-purpose importer. I’m afraid I don’t have the funding to build such a plugin right now, but it will definitely be crucial to the growth of BP as a platform in the months and years to come.
