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What is Easy Popluate for? What does it do?


loxly

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No one will read this, but I will post it anyways in hopes that it comes up in some of the searchs that people bother to do. :)

 

Posted August 5, 2003 - in case someone adds features in the future...

 

Easy Populate has one purpose, to get a lot of products into the product DATABASE quickly and easily. As an added attraction it creates new categories as well. It takes information from a spreadsheet or delimited file that you have or you create, and that is formated to the Easy Populate format.

 

Easy Populate supports several contribs that use the product table to store information, like a couple of the image contribs and the header tags and possibly still separate pricing per customer.

 

It saves a large amount of time when you have an existing database or you have items that can be entered easily in a spreadsheet.

 

You CAN load almost any thing into your database using phpMyAdmin and comma delimited files if you want to learn how. It allows you to even load up the attributes table, but you still have to assign the attributes to your products some other way, by hand in the admin or using an attribute contribution. Read your server and your software documentation to find out how.

 

**What it does not do**

 

*EP does not upload images to your server, or anything else for that matter. Use ftp or a file manger to get the files on the server.

 

*EP has standard fields only, if you add custom fields to your database YOU have to figure out how to add them to EP, many suggestions on how to do that in the 100's of pages of messages about this script. Do a search.

 

*EP does not now and probably will not ever load attributes. Attributes are not handled the way categories or product infomation is and the code is too complex, at least for the people that have attempted it so far. After you use EP to get the products into the database, use one of the attribute handling contribs to add and copy attributes.

 

*EP handles html sort of. It depends on your server, your version of php, your version of mySql, time of day and phase of the moon :) If you have complex information in your product descriptions and it doesn't load well into EP you have 2 options to get it there.

 

1. After you load your file without descriptions, go into admin and add the descriptions there. Time consuming, but at least you have a base to work from instead of entering everything by hand.

 

2. Use the contribution that adds the ability to call an html file into your description page. I will try and find the link. Then you create an html file for each product and it gets called as an include into the product_info.php page.

 

Easy Populate is designed to save you time, but it can't load everything into your whole database. Would that it could.....

 

The original authors are off doing other things now, so if someone else has the skills to upgrade the code and add additional features, please do and please post it for the rest of the community to enjoy as well.

 

You would probably be elevated to sainthood if you can figure out how to handle attributes with EP or a similar script :) :) :)

[no external urls in signatures please, kthanks]

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I would add too that it's a very nice and quick way to update your products, move them between categories, and keep an off-line inventory of your shop...

 

Certainly beats doing mass product updates or moves via the Admin tool.

 

-al

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