VendingBox Plugin Support Thread

[vb_support]

This is the official support thread for the VendingBox plugin.

The plugin is available at:
http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...oducts_id=1888

This plugin allows you to connect your Zen Cart site to the service at VendingBox.net. The service provides you with a mobile customizable storefront, written in Flash, which can be placed on Facebook, blogs or any other website.

When a customer shares one of your products to a Facebook wall, a mini-store appears on the wall through which other customers can purchase or share the products. Purchases made through the VendingBox can appear alongside your other orders in the Zen Cart admin section.

The plugin is installed by extracting the zip file and putting the vendingbox_feed.php file in the main directory of the Zen Cart site.

Once you have opened an account at:
http://www.vendingbox.net/?ref=zen
you can specify the url of the vendingbox_feed.php file in the Configuration->Cart Integration section and click "Import All Settings".

Currently, only PayPal is supported. We plan to add support for other payment systems such as AuthorizeNet, 2CheckOut and Google Checkout in the coming weeks.

Only radio and drop-down attributes are supported right now. We will add support for checkbox attributes soon. Also, only table rate, flat rate, zone and per-item shipping information is imported. We hope to add support for UPS, USPS and Fedex soon.

Please let us know which features are most important to you; we will prioritize the implementation of features that are frequently requested.


Many Zen Cart users will have installed other add-ons which change the database structure and cause problems when importing information to the VendingBox. If anybody has problems like this, please let us know, and tell us what add-ons you have installed. We can usually modify the code to make it compatible with other add-ons once we know what changes they involve.

Other unforeseen problems will occasionally occur, but we can fix them relatively quickly once they're brought to our attention.


Yours,
The VB Support Team.

[gal_op]

Hi There,
Great Addone idea, thanks!

But it is not working for me
When clicking import all settings i get:

"No valid feed could be found at the specified URL. Please ensure that you have installed the correct plugin and have entered the URL correctly. "

I have uploaded the file into our root folder so i think it might be an addone issue, we have installed the following addones:
Ceon URI Mapping
Easy populate
image handler
Zen lightbox
Sitemap XML
Google Base datafeed
Site bBackup
Mailbeez

Zen cart version is 1.3.9
themineralmiracle.com.au

Thanks

[vb_support]

Hi There,
Great Addone idea, thanks!

But it is not working for me
When clicking import all settings i get:


I have uploaded the file into our root folder so i think it might be an addone issue, we have installed the following addones:
Ceon URI Mapping ...

Hi gal_op,

We're getting 404 (not found) errors when we try to import your products. This is probably caused by the Ceon URI Mapping add-on.

We'll try to fix this by making changes on our server. If that doesn't work, we'll release a new version of the VendingBox plugin which can deal with the complications of Ceon URI.

Yours,
VendingBox Support.

[vb_support]

Hi There,
Great Addone idea, thanks!

But it is not working for me...

Zen cart version is 1.3.9
themineralmiracle.com.au

Thanks

Hi,

The problem with Ceon URI Mapping can be solved by putting the URL of the vendingbox_feed.php file into the list of URL's which are to be excluded from remapping.

The way to do this is to log in to the admin section, go to Modules -> Ceon URI Mapping (SEO) Config, and then enter:

/vendingbox_feed.php

into the Excluded Files box at the end. If there are already files listed in the box, add /vendingbox_feed.php to the end of the comma-separated list. Then click Save and the VendingBox imports should work.

For users who have their Zen Cart folder in a subdirectory, they should use the full path to the vendingbox_feed.php file. For example, if the store is located at http://mystore.com/store/ then you would add /store/vendingbox_feed.php to the list of excluded files.

Many thanks to gal_op for finding the issue. We'll add these instructions to the installation instructions for the next release of the plugin.

Best regards,
VB Support.

[gal_op]

Thanks!

Thanks working great

[mmadany]

Hi,

I am trying to configure my store with Vending Box but every time I try to Import All Settings, I get the following error message:

No valid feed could be found at the specified URL. Please ensure that you have installed the correct plugin and have entered the URL correctly.

My website is www.modernhejab.com

I have also added /vendingbox_feed.php to the excluded files for Ceon URI Mapping (SEO)

Please let me know what I am doing wrong. Your help is greatly appreciated!

[vb_support]

Hi,

The file seems to be there but is redirecting to your main site for some reason. We'll communicate with you through email to solve the problem and put the solution here so that others can make use of it if the same thing happens to them.

Best regards,
VendingBox Support.

[vb_support]

This problem arises when the .htaccess file is set to redirect requests to the index.php script.

If your .htaccess file looks like the following:

# Don't rewrite any URIs ending with a file extension (ending with .[xxxxx])
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.[a-zA-Z]{2,5}$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(html|htm|php)$ [NC]
# Don't rewrite admin directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/zc_admin [NC]
# Don't rewrite editors directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/editors [NC]
# Don't rewrite cPanel directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/cpanel [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/frontend [NC]
# Handle all other URIs using Zen Cart (index.php)
RewriteRule .* index.php?%{QUERY_STRING} [L]


then you need to add the following two lines just above the "# Handle all other ..." line:

# Don't rewrite VendingBox feed request
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/vendingbox [NC]

This will prevent mod_rewrite from intercepting requests made to the vendingbox_feed.php file.

Thanks to mmadany for finding the issue.

[vb_support]

Support for AuthorizeNet and SagePay have now been added.

There have also been improvements for dealing with large numbers of products. The categories are loaded at the time that the user clicks into them if the number of products exceeds 1,000, so there won't be a huge delay in loading the VendingBox if you have 20,000 products.

Also, a number of users have been putting the checkout_success, checkout_process or even the ipn_main_handler.php scripts as the Return Url.

This isn't advisable because the Return Url is the URL to which the user will be brought after the purchase is complete. If the user is brought to the checkout_success script after making a purchase from the VendingBox, the Zen Cart site will say "Oops, your session has expired", because it doesn't recognize the user.

If you don't have a specialized page that says, "Thank you for your purchase", you can use the following URL:
https://www.vendingbox.net/payment_successful.php

[Rizla]

Nice idea but not so good for me!
I managed to get it installed on second try and it appeared to work on my facebook page. However, my sales pages have many attributes (needed) and VendingBox would not show them all.