EasyPopulate 4.0 Support Thread

[caffeitalia]

Awesome... you learn something new every day!
Thank you!

[davowave]

Hello chadderuski,

thanks for making easy populate work with 1.5!

At the moment I'm running 1.3.7 but I'm redesigning my site and upgrading to 1.5 at the same time. I clean installed 1.5 using the database upgrade so that my categories and products and descriptions would be intact, which they are. However, when I installed your version of easy populate and downloaded the csv in a few of the descriptions where I had used ... (dot dot dot) … appeared instead.

Whats going on and how do I fix it and stop it happening again?

[chadderuski]

Hello chadderuski,

thanks for making easy populate work with 1.5!

At the moment I'm running 1.3.7 but I'm redesigning my site and upgrading to 1.5 at the same time. I clean installed 1.5 using the database upgrade so that my categories and products and descriptions would be intact, which they are. However, when I installed your version of easy populate and downloaded the csv in a few of the descriptions where I had used ... (dot dot dot) … appeared instead.

Whats going on and how do I fix it and stop it happening again?

You have a similar situation as caffeitalia, but with ... (which is call "ellipsis").

Here is a good article on the problem:

http://www.toao.net/48-replacing-sma...ashes-in-mysql

You can do a manual edit and do a search/replace in a good PLAIN text editor and use the html equivalent which is …

These conversion issues are common when moving from iso-8859-1 to utf8. I have an update I'm posting soon that will help with some multi-byte character issues, but I'll have to look at these problematic characters more closely.

Hope this helps!
chadd

PS! Be sure to read the notes on using OpenOffice. OpenOffice will let you select your character set on import/export of your csv file. Excel will NOT!

[chadderuski]

Awesome... you learn something new every day!
Thank you!

Glad this helped. Be sure to read the above linked article - very useful info.

[chadderuski]

Concerning Curly Quotes, EmDash, Ellipsis, etc...

I have a solution that may help people deal with this. Will include in my next push to Github. Basically, I'm going to add an option to EP4's Configuration page that will let you choose whether to leave these characters as is at import, change to simplified versions, or replace with HTML equivalents (best choice in my opinion).

I hope to be able to push the next update withing the next couple of days.

-Chadd

[VideoStan]

Congrats Chadd on your success with EP4.

I had an indirect exposure to your work about a year ago when checking in with JRobeson on his project.

I am testing EP4 in a new install of ZC1.5 that must use attributes. Basic import of standard products/descriptions using EP4 seems to work fine.

My tests with attributes are not successful, until I change the filename beginning to your sample name: Attrib-EP-xxxx

I also used the file structure in the sample (single line per product, only the 4 columns, desired attributes in one column, separate by commas).

The results info at the bottom of the screen shows no updates/no adds, but the items do in fact update.

Adding price is critical. I'll test some of the other attrib options. Any other filename beginnings that should be used with other columns added?

Stan

[chadderuski]

Congrats Chadd on your success with EP4.

I had an indirect exposure to your work about a year ago when checking in with JRobeson on his project.

I am testing EP4 in a new install of ZC1.5 that must use attributes. Basic import of standard products/descriptions using EP4 seems to work fine.

My tests with attributes are not successful, until I change the filename beginning to your sample name: Attrib-EP-xxxx

I also used the file structure in the sample (single line per product, only the 4 columns, desired attributes in one column, separate by commas).

The results info at the bottom of the screen shows no updates/no adds, but the items do in fact update.

Adding price is critical. I'll test some of the other attrib options. Any other filename beginnings that should be used with other columns added?

Stan

Hi Stan! How have ya been?

Yeah, Johnny has some awesome stuff in his code. Haven't been in touch for some time. I don't know what he thinks of 1.5. I think zenmagik will have to catchup before he considers supporting 1.5. When I complete attributes for EP4 I'll give him another poke to see if he interested in the code. We had different ideas on how to solve the issue. His were more along the lines of what langer does in his 3.03 version. I have a rant about that somewhere :) ....

You are correct. I do NOT have any nice stats to the attribute import yet. I added the stats so you could turn off "verbose" output for better performance, but since I'm still working hard on the import code so I haven't added stats yet. What "price" are you referring to?

Yes, for Attribute import to work you need to follow naming convention of the file.

I am going to be back on attributes very soon. I got sidetracked fixing the UTF8 multi-byte character handling for multi-lingual categories which I'm going to try to push to github tonight. Then it's back to giving myself monster headaches with attributes!

-chadd

[VideoStan]

I need to price by attribute. Adding the attributes is good, but have to edit each one to add pricing. All the other attribute issues (default, etc) would be the same, so could set as global (I think).

Looking at your full export, I think it is v_options_values_price.

[chadderuski]

I need to price by attribute. Adding the attributes is good, but have to edit each one to add pricing. All the other attribute issues (default, etc) would be the same, so could set as global (I think).

Looking at your full export, I think it is v_options_values_price.

Yes. My plan is to allow simple and complex attribute creation. Simple to create the basic entries and assign to products, complex to make fine adjustments and settings. Trying to do everything at once is very complicated when you take error checking and multiple languages into consideration.

[stepgr]

Chadd

is there a way to move products from one category to the other ? I don't want to have
double items in the catalog and I haven't figure out if there is way to do so ?