Froogle Merchant Center merged into GoogleBase

[Woodymon]

Woody, I have a feeling I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about the currency showing which I disable by setting Show Default Currency to false.

Doh!. I missed seeing the admin config etnry just above "Default Currency" . And I just set to false and answered my question. Set to false removes both the price and the currency from the link URL as well as removes the "currency" attribute field from the feed.

Thanks for the tip.

I also observe the product "brand" attribute is empty throughout the feed.

On one of my sites I'm using the Short Description mod for an "author" field. Thinking I will map that product field to the brand attribute for froogle feed output. And add a switch in admin to disable.

Or I could map the ZC product manufacturer field to the brand attribute in feed. That probably makes more sense, but not for the shop I'm working on at the moment ;-)

Note you can use the Short Description field for any type of product descriptor (e.g. author, publisher, etc).

Regards to the ID field in the feed I was considering mapping it tothe Zen Cart product model number. But ID value has to be distinct in the feed and some shopowners apply same model number to different products (as they use zen cart product attributes do the differentiating). Thus assigning model number to ID field is not a good idea. Will let it remain mapped to product_id.

Woody

[Woodymon]

Note the cron job doesn't actually FTP. It just pings Google to come and get it. After the ping, the come and get it part can take awhile.

I wasn't thinking straight when I wrote the above. Forgive me. That point applied to old googleFroogle feeder version.

What does the cron job report you receive in email say?

The feed uploaded via FTP is not promptly processed/published by Google. Did you give it a day or two then check?

Woody

[ecobunz]

when you say "they come and get it" surely it just toses up a URL for them to grab it from, correct?

Did you install 1.33a fresh or update over a previous GoogleFroogle mod version?

Test if you can manually FTP your feed from a FTP client either on your PC via a FTP client hosted on your server (not a web based upload).

Note the cron job doesn't actually FTP. It just pings Google to come and get it. After the ping, the come and get it part can take awhile.

Woody

[Woodymon]

when you say "they come and get it" surely it just toses up a URL for them to grab it from, correct?

See above post.

[ecobunz]

Very strange, I can see the files in /feeds on my server. I can manually FTP it. I can upload via the web page. I see the output in my cronjobs in my log files - but the googlebase uploads list never shows the bulk updates.

Will keep on troubleshooting.

[rcrosier]

Very strange, I can see the files in /feeds on my server. I can manually FTP it. I can upload via the web page. I see the output in my cronjobs in my log files - but the googlebase uploads list never shows the bulk updates.

Will keep on troubleshooting.

Ecobunz: Just curious, is there ANY chance that your website is set up with/without "www" in front of it, and you set up google/froogle the OPPOSITE way?

This happened to me with the sitemaps, and once I figured that out, I got it all working.

I had set up a site in sitemaps as "www.mysite.com", but my installation of Zen Cart was "mysite.com". I THINK I had a similar problem with Froogle. I changed them all to match my site, and voila, they worked.

[ctcentralinfo]

I can't seem to get around this time out issue. I hope this is something that can be fixed in the next version. I would be willing to pay a_berezin for a fix at this point.

[ctcentralinfo]

I checked my error log via Cpanel and I am getting the following errors:

[Sat Mar 31 15:41:19 2007] [error] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: in /home/<username>/public_html/googlefroogle.php on line 278
[Sat Mar 31 15:41:19 2007] [error] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: retval in /home/<username>/public_html/googlefroogle.php on line 278
[Sat Mar 31 15:41:19 2007] [error] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: retval in /home/<username>/public_html/googlefroogle.php on line 281
[Sat Mar 31 15:41:19 2007] [error] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: retval in /home/<username>/public_html/googlefroogle.php on line 280
[Sat Mar 31 15:41:19 2007] [error] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: retval in /home/<username>/public_html/googlefroogle.php on line 278

[Pixxi]

As I said in PM, you're seeing those PHP notices because I (temporarily) turned on error reporting in your googlefroogle.php file to see if there was any infomation that would help with the timeout problem you said you were having. Error reporting is turned off now, and your googlefroogle.php file returned to its original state, so you won't see those anymore.

In case it might help anyone else, I'll describe briefly what appears to be happening. This is pretty well what I've already said to you via PM.

The problem you appear to have is not a timeout (the mod does loop through all the records in your database and reports the correct number), rather that only the first batch of records processed by the mod (c. 177 in your case) is written to the feed file.

After the first batch (in $output_buffer) is written to the feed file, $retval appears to become NULL in the function zen_froogle_fwrite() and further batches are not written. Each further attempt to write the contents of $output_buffer to the feed file appears to result in an 'undefined variable' notice

If you count the number of 'undefined variable' notices that appear (after you've run the feed generation) and multiply them by the size of the first batch written (c. 177 records) it comes out pretty near to the number of records in your database.

I tried this on a shop of mine where the feed does complete successfully (ie. all records are processed and written), and (with error reporting turned on) the same PHP notices appeared, so the appearance of the warning notices doesn't seem directly related to whether all the batches of records are written or not.

Searching on php.net, it appears there is/was a bug in PHP 4.3.2 that can result in the returned variable from a function becoming (or being reported as) NULL after the first iteration, although it appears that this doesn't always affect the output of the variable - ie. sometimes the variable still functions, but sometimes it doesn't - put another way, it appears the behaviour can be unpredictable.

It's not clear from the bug report(s) whether this bug has been fixed in PHP 4.x.x or only in PHP 5.x.x.

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=22836%22

But whether this is the cause of your problem or not I don't know - perhaps someone else can chip in with their knowledge/experiences.

Did you try installing a stock zen demo shop in a subdirectory on your server with just the Froogle mod installed as I suggested? If the Froogle mod runs and completes all records on a stock zen demo shop, you will know it's not your server setup.

Then load a *copy* of your live database into the stock zen demo shop and try running the Froogle mod again - does it complete all records? - if it does, then you know it's possibly another mod you have installed on your (live) shop (or a difference in admin settings perhaps) that's causing the problem.

If it doesn't complete all records, then it's possibly something in your live database that's causing the problem.

In any case, it should help you to narrow things down a bit.

As I said in PM, please make sure you change your passwords on cpanel, FTP and your admin now so you can be sure I no longer have access - this is for my security too.

[Pixxi]

Just a small clarification to the last part of my post above.

When I said '... completes all records ...' I mean check that the number of records actually written to the feed file matches the number of active products in the shop.

In your case, the mod will *report* it's processed all records, and will show the correct number, but you will need to actually look in the feed file and see how many it's actually written to know if it's worked correctly or not.