Automatic upload of Easy Populate data?

Thank you to DoNothing! I finally have easypopulate running from crontab following instructions by this post. I have no rilevant diffuculties to do this. But I have a question: anyone knows how i can do this with oscommerce?
I have not find a "init_admin_auth.php" in oscommerce.
Can someone help me? I'm sure most oscommerce administrators was trying to have this usefully function.

Thanks for all!!

maulapi:

anyone knows how i can do this with oscommerce?Sorry, but this is not an appropriate place to look for oscommerce support.

Donothing Thanks so much for the info and it helped alot.

Ok, its been a year since I looked at this and am coming back to it because I need to know how to run it using apache o windows 7.

The only problem im having really is setting the patch in the script. The script itself works fine, Thanks donothing! :)

This is donothings example:

/usr/bin/lynx -accept_all_cookies -dump http://localhost/PathTo/admin/cron1.php

The patch from C:\ on my machine is c:\server\xampp\htdocs\websitefolder\

What donothing suggest I should be looking for a bin\ folder which is at c:\server\xampp\apache\bin\

Im just wondering how I put this - my/user/path -accept_all_cookies -dump http://localhost/PathTo/admin/cron1.php

Thanks

DB

has anyone out there managed to get the cron job of easy populate to work? I tried it. I get a PHP fatal error in includes/functions/sessions.php line 41. Basically it doesn't find my admin user in the session table and stops. I follows DoNothing's instructions, and others here say they got it working. Would love to automate calls to easy populate for importing data! thanks for any help anyone can provide.

Everyone - I got this working too with donothing's help! He/She rocks! This is making a huge difference for me and I greatly appreciate it.

I have a new (free) app/service that I am releasing in the next month or so that will help with this issue. What I have come to realize is that this issue is not cart specific but is industry specific. I have searched for solutions and I found one that is OK, but they force you to use THEIR suppliers for your store inventory.

Anyway, my idea was to make any standard distributor data file easily converted to any import format for ANY cart and automate the inventory updates. I can tell you that I have successfully created data feed CSV files for importing to Magento, shopify, oscommerce, zencart within minutes with it and I think this will become a hand-in-hand tool with easy populate.

I am not here for a backlink, but just letting people know that I am working on something that helps with this (and its free!) Right now registration is disabled on the site, but you can sign up for the newsletter for updates and launch date.

the site is automaticinventory.net and I will be adding the zen-cart addon once the site is fully finished and live. ETA is a month or so.

automaticinventory:

I am not here for a backlink, but just letting people know that I am working on something that helps with this (and its free!)

This will be most helpful... Any indication of what the subscription fee may be set at?

schoolboy:

This will be most helpful... Any indication of what the subscription fee may be set at?

Well, I've been pricing other services that provide similar technologies, and they vary from anywhere between $50/month to $400/month. $50/month being the cheapest and they require you to use THEIR suppliers, not your own. $400 was a service provided by another distributor itself.

I am thinking that $30-$50 per month is a fair price to pay to keep your inventory updated daily. It's cheaper than hiring someone, easier than doing it yourself, and far more accurate that manual inventory updating.

There will also be a free service that allows you to manually configure the data feed and download it, rather than have it automatically built every day and pushed to your site.

The idea is that I am doing this to help people, not just in it for the money.

I will have a demo up on the site this week if all goes well.

Thanks!

Here is the basic flow chart for how the FREE service will work.
Subscriptions have more features and we can push the feed.csv file to your site's temp directory so you can have one click Easy Populate updates.

schoolboy:

This will be most helpful... Any indication of what the subscription fee may be set at?

Sorry to post again, but I just read through the add-on requirements and I will have to have the zen-cart addon be for the free csv creator tool section of the site only.

It is not a "crippled" addon by any means since you can create full product imports in just a few clicks. However, I will be offering subscription accounts for those who wish to get more out of it such as daily updates and other advanced features.

I need to check with the admins before going any further on this. I will post here again once I get some answers.

In a day or two, I will have the demo site up. Here is a screenshot.

Here is a link to a quick video I made this morning. I went through pretty fast and there is no audio, but it kinda shows the general idea of setting up a data feed. Once you set up a data feed, you connect your easy populate to it and it will automatically transfer your CSV to your temp_dir for easypopulate. More to come!
http://youtu.be/qNDfYraYyAA

Many dedicated zencart developers have created free "lite" versions of their commercial modules, reserving the "advanced" features for commercial gain. So there should be no problem with your approach. I personally do not have a problem with this at all and uphold the principle of supporting clever developers who provide useful solutions, yet who also offer help and services pro-bono.

I have many clients who would subscribe to your service, so the sooner it gets going the better. :clap:

Demo should be up tonight or tomorrow. Then the free service will be very soon after. The advanced version is still under some testing and will be available in February. I want to get the demo/free up so that people can get used to the interface and give feedback / ideas. This thing is complicated on the programming side, but simple for the user. I can build an inventory feed for any standard distributor csv/txt file in about 2 minutes lol. It used to take days or weeks.... :)

The you tube link above is broken, so here is a new one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjXYU_VqmkM

You could use this free tool to go to the supplier site, download their file or copy column/rows/info on their site and insert it into a file on your local computer in the correct format and then upload it to your site. All automated, completely free, and very powerful. It can scrape anything, text, images, whatever off of sites and upload to your site/insert into your database. I use it and it's very powerful. There is a learning curve to make it do more specific things (they have a very good user manual), but you can also hire the developers to create specific robots. They charged me $100 to write the first one I needed and now I just tweak that one to do other things.

Please make sure you have signed contracts giving you specific permission to scrape content from anyone's site and re-use it on your own. If you don't, then you are violating copyright. That's illegal, and we don't tolerate that around here.

DrByte:

Please make sure you have signed contracts giving you specific permission to scrape content from anyone's site and re-use it on your own. If you don't, then you are violating copyright. That's illegal, and we don't tolerate that around here.

Good point! I wasn't even thinking about that. We just use it for inventory updates from vendor sites and getting images and product descriptions from manufacturers'/vendors' websites (which of course we have permission to do). Thanks for making that issue of copyright explicit.

The app I am building does not scrape anything :)

the robot I posted about can also just download a file, copy and paste columns from one file to another, etc, so it's not just a scraper. I have one vendor that posts an updated inventory csv file at 5:10pm every day so our bot goes and downloads it at 5:15, converts to the EP format and uploads it.