Quote Originally Posted by Zean View Post
Thanks for the heads-up. I'm excited to see it since you seem to be saying the "different plugin" "offers additional fields."
I'm hoping it offers the SORT ORDER fields I had to give up on as explained here

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....54#post1312654
Don't know. Unfortunately I had a detailed response for you, but in reply to someone else I lost it and didn't go back to recreate it. One of the sort orders though is already available in the categories import/export if I remember correctly, just not in the products list. As I recall also, one of the desired sort orders to be included/listed in conjunction with other data would have caused a sequencing issue without extensive rewrite for something covered in a separate area that is/was specifically designed to address that aspect.

For more information about the other plugin look through recent posts and maybe even reach out to lankeeyankee. As has come customary of most recent public plugins, the code can be previewed/downloaded from github.

The biggest difference I have seen is 1) good luck writing your own set of code to accomplish larger tasks, 2) get to know your specific import file because you will have to "choose" between various import options based on how the file was generated which may not be a big issue if one always follows the same process for each file, 3) supposedly the export auto_expands to include multiple fields rather than them being considered/added to the filter(s).

Haven't looked deeply at the import process but did seem some limiting factors related to number of fields, so hoping for those that like to otherwise limit the number of fields on which they upload that they can still do that.

One thing that really shouldn't surprise me is that one question has already been asked from the perspective of an action to be "incorporated" and pointed out as a "problem" of EP4, but has not as I have seen it been a requested feature or modification of EP4. Too bad, like many of the other improvements that were going to be made, such an additional option could have been added to EP4 upon request. My plan is to document possible improvements or the planned mods for EP4 in the original developers area. As said before I took this up because it had great promise, was functional, and support could not be provided by the original author because of other commitments. Further other EP products were non-functional out-of-the-box, didn't offer the same breadth of options, and were too rigid in their construct. This plugin has been around for 4 years, although only recently uploaded to ZC and apparently there remain mainy users that don't read the documentation and have gotten their sites into some trouble as a result (mostly related to the CHAR_SET being wrong between EP4 (strictly has been using UTF-8) and the site (possibly likely latin1) which was also something that was going to be addressed, but another no-need at this point).

Floor is still open on the topic of EP4, but other than the absence of SBA related items, which I seriously doubt would be included by the author because of a conflict of interest in their own commercial product, it seems to me to be the same thing just another variant. Such variants are expected to be minimized in and by the ZC community.