Creating an add-on "product type book" for ZC 1.5

[breda]

Thanks P,
It seems to be the add to cart step that causes the error and if you go back a step in the browser you'll see that the side box for Shopping cart has the product added in, so it seems to add it to the cart but can't display the cart page.
Regards
Breda

[philou]

Hi Breda,

this needs another change inside , which will be part of the next release:
I'm not sure of the line numbers you have after the first change, but I'm sure you will find it. Should be somewhere after line 550.

replace this line:
$ids[$product['id']] = $key;

with these lines:

if (!empty($product['attributes'])) {
//*** this product with attributes, so ID needs to be cleaned
$id_parts = explode(':', $product['id']);
$ids[$id_parts[0]] = $key;
} else {
$ids[$product['id']] = $key;
}

Hope that works. Let us know.
Best,
p.

[breda]

Hi P,
Brilliant that fixed it!
I must make a donation to your site.
Thanks,
Breda

[philou]

Hi P,
Brilliant that fixed it!
I must make a donation to your site.
Thanks,
Breda

Glad it works now.
I'll buy the cat some caviar then ;)

Best,
p.

[breda]

Lucky cat!
B

[philou]

Hey Breda,

thank you so much for your donation!
I'm working on the 1.0 release. Currently testing the plugin in a real-life shop environment and I discover a few little bugs so once that's fixed I'll post it here.

Best wishes,
p.

[bwidener]

I have been helping a friend with a bookstore site and have installed your plugin. It is at resurrectedreads.com. A couple of immediate issues that I was wondering about.

1. Bulk import? Can the info be imported at all from a csv or spreadsheet?

2. On a book detail page, there is a section "Other books by %s:" Can this be fixed to have the authors name?

Thanks for the help in advance, and keep up the good work!

Brice

[Design75]

I have been helping a friend with a bookstore site and have installed your plugin. It is at resurrectedreads.com. A couple of immediate issues that I was wondering about.

1. Bulk import? Can the info be imported at all from a csv or spreadsheet?

2. On a book detail page, there is a section "Other books by %s:" Can this be fixed to have the authors name?

Thanks for the help in advance, and keep up the good work!

Brice

1: Bulk import should be possible, when you use Easy populate 4 it is very easy to add extra field you would like to add to the import besides the standard fields.

2: Not sure why you see %s but that should automatically be replaced by the name of the author, maybe philou van help with that.

[philou]

1: Bulk import should be possible, when you use Easy populate 4 it is very easy to add extra field you would like to add to the import besides the standard fields.

2: Not sure why you see %s but that should automatically be replaced by the name of the author, maybe philou van help with that.

Thanks to Design 75 for suggesting Easy Populate. I have in fact never used that, so I can't say too much about it.
I don't know if Easy Populate can also create product entries for other types than "Product - General". If you can get your books into the shop as "Product – General" you can use the BookX Tool to convert those to product type "BookX".

That saves you already some time, but it will only work with basic info, your Bookx "extra info" will have to be added by hand (or directly in the MYSQL DB, but that's tricky). BookX has it's own table for special fields like "subtitle", "ISBN" etc. I doubt that Easy Populate can find those and populate them correctly. Quickly looking at the code I also see a shortcoming in my code for the conversion of "Product - general" to "BookX". Now is however not a good time for me to improve this. I will put it on my list for the next release planned for January 2014. A bulk-import via BookX Tool should not bee terribly difficult for me to add, but most probably not for the 1.0 release.

2.) That the "%s" is in your HTML output is very strange. I thought the PHP command "sprintf" fails gracefully, meaning it should in the worst case show "Other books by :", but not the variable placeholder "%s"… Also, on the page I saw on your site, you do have an author assigned to the book, so I don't understand why it is not shown there then. Must in fact be a bug. Since it works here, I'm not sure for the moment how to proceed finding the bug there. Do you have debugging on in your Shop? If so, maybe there is something relating to this in the debug logs in the "cache" folder of your site? Just make a page request and see if a brand new log appears.
Another possibility is that it is a bug that I already fixed in my current development version of the plugin, but again I can't check that now unfortunately.

Hope all that helps you along !

Best,
philou

[bwidener]

Thanks to Design 75 for suggesting Easy Populate. I have in fact never used that, so I can't say too much about it.
I don't know if Easy Populate can also create product entries for other types than "Product - General". If you can get your books into the shop as "Product – General" you can use the BookX Tool to convert those to product type "BookX".

That saves you already some time, but it will only work with basic info, your Bookx "extra info" will have to be added by hand (or directly in the MYSQL DB, but that's tricky). BookX has it's own table for special fields like "subtitle", "ISBN" etc. I doubt that Easy Populate can find those and populate them correctly. Quickly looking at the code I also see a shortcoming in my code for the conversion of "Product - general" to "BookX". Now is however not a good time for me to improve this. I will put it on my list for the next release planned for January 2014. A bulk-import via BookX Tool should not bee terribly difficult for me to add, but most probably not for the 1.0 release.

2.) That the "%s" is in your HTML output is very strange. I thought the PHP command "sprintf" fails gracefully, meaning it should in the worst case show "Other books by :", but not the variable placeholder "%s"… Also, on the page I saw on your site, you do have an author assigned to the book, so I don't understand why it is not shown there then. Must in fact be a bug. Since it works here, I'm not sure for the moment how to proceed finding the bug there. Do you have debugging on in your Shop? If so, maybe there is something relating to this in the debug logs in the "cache" folder of your site? Just make a page request and see if a brand new log appears.
Another possibility is that it is a bug that I already fixed in my current development version of the plugin, but again I can't check that now unfortunately.

Hope all that helps you along !

Best,
philou

In which file would I find the "Other books by"? I would like to change it to "Other books by this author" or something generic like that.

Brice