A few comments on MC's comments - just as general discussion :p
I. Personally think this is the most robust of the Easy Populate versions and could be the one to bring in the functionality of the other versions.
EP4 is VERY robust, but to achieve this some things had to be changed from Langer's version.
- Separate upload from import/export (no streaming data up or down)
- Us PHP's built in CSV file reading and writing functions
- Ability to turn off "verbose" feedback
These changes made it possible for EP4 to do MASSIVE imports very quickly. I was working with an electronics parts store with over 900,000 product sku's. Even on a dedicated server, the old EP code would time out, and run out of memory.
After the above re-writes, I could easily upload the full 900,000 item csv file, use the split utility to break into blocks of 50,000
records, and import the 50,000 records in about 12 seconds.
I've begun looking into what is necessary to produce froogle related files to address one of the strains. Then I'd like to see what is different about this versions csv file creation as compared to the one that is supposedly excel file friendly. Looking at the downloads section, only one appears to have been updated in the last year or so unfortunately. Perhaps those other versions aren't as independent of Zen Cart functionality as this one. It could be made to rely more on the zc code, but then the error log functionality would basically be lost as instead the ZC error logging process would come into play and that probably would require incorporating the display error log plugin.
First:
MS Excel has been very frustrating to work with... to many versions, to many variations of CSV files, and the inability to set
your language type. Don't forget the limit of 256 character in a cell (maybe a recent version of Excel has fixed this?). OpenOffice creates a standard CSV without these limitation, and has the ability to set your language source at import and export.
Also, PHP's built in CSV read/write functions have no problems with Open Offices exported CSV files, but strange things happen
when you use Excel (which I believe puts different info in the header of the file), but this is dependent on the version of excel and the type of CSV you create.
Langer's old code manually processed the text file. It worked, and was perhaps more forgiving, but it was also incredibly slow.
So I replaced all that convoluted mess with a single php function call ....
Second:
I had already begun to work on mappable export/import files. If you look in the code, you'll see it commented out. It was just a start for something more flexible and robust, but it's quite doable.
Having the ability to use custom products fields (done) with mappable import/export would be much better than hard coding support for specific plug-ins. This has been my ultimate goal with EP4, but life intrudes and I've not met my goals.
I've already been able to incorporate another popular ZC plugin into EP4 and plan to complete all currently desired aspects in the next couple of weeks with other work allowing. In the mean time there may be some other minor updates to this in the near future to address some other efficiencies and functionality.
MC's help in supporting and expanding EP4 is really appreciated. He's helped keep EP4 alive for well over a year now!
Buy him some coffee or a nice dinner, he deserves it! :p
-chadd
