jestep

To emphasize how important this problem is, suppose you have a web site with a large amount of products and you have very competitive pricing. You want to insure that you have daily sales, so you turn to (Greedy) Google and you agree to a large daily budget for Adwords. The "reset cache" problem is not fixed. Now you want to be on the front page when a client/visitor shops and wants to compare your product/s to those of your competition so you raise your daily (Greedy) Google budget. Meanwhile the cache totally fills up and you don't know it. All your shoppers pick a product and at check out, go to a blank page. Sales drop off and no one tells you that your web site is not working so you raise your daily (Greedy) Google budget some more. Finally after weeks of no sales some kind soul tells you about the problem: "Hey, I want to buy your XYZ product but I can't. There's something wrong with you web site. I can't login. I just get a blank page." My hosting service, a totally disinterested party, puts it this way: "It's a common issue, especially on a site written in PHP which has no structure AT ALL. In the future, when you change fundamental functions of the script or upgrade/downgrade it to any version or change anything in anyway, clear the cache of that module by removing all files within catalog/includes/modules/ultimate_seo_urls5/cache_system/cache folder." One other thing came to light during this "exercise". The current release of Ultimate SEO URLs 5 PRO (Release 205) contains a folder called "drop_on_top". Below it is another folder called "drop_on_top_v2.3". If you have gone to the effort to install the latest milestone and you are currently at v2.3.3.4, I suggest you compare each and every program in the "drop_on_top_v2.3" folder using DiffMerge, or a similar product, before you ASS-U-ME that is is the latest milestone. We need to know exactly which version is supplied before we drop an older version on top of the latest version. However, in the defense of our contributor, I will also say that this is a very well prepared contribution compared to many others. This may also be a wake-up call to all of us waiting on forth-coming versions like v2.4 or v3.? that PHP may not the answer or that the design chosen and blessed by osCommerce management may not be as safe as some other e-commerce packages which you have to purchase (i.e. Not open source) that are currently on the market today. We all agree that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important, but in my opinion you can optimize til the cows come home but if (Greedy) Google decides that your daily budget is not large enough they can tweek their "algorithm" and suddenly you can't show up on Google or Bing or whatever no matter how much you optimize. That is why I have asked to have changes made to Easy Populate and to Googlefeeder so that the new SEO fields in this package can be entered and uploaded to (Greedy) Google. The argument I hear is that not everyone uses these two programs so they (or this concept) should not be in the core programs of a future release. If you are a "newbie" you will soon learn that entering products one at a time is SLOW and EXPENSIVE. On the other hand, I can enter 1,000 products at a time with Easy Populate from a spreadsheet and I can also download my entire database at one time. What is missing now is the ability to enter all these new SEO fields or to download them. In other words, the "front door" going in to osCommerce and the "back door" coming out from osCommerce is controlled by one single person (contributor). Likewise, if we want to figure out a creative way to put data into the many new SEO fields in this package, from the scant information that most of our suppliers provide, then we should be able to upload this data to (Greedy) Google. Unfortunately, Googlefeeder does not allow any of these new fields.

Well my problem was not a hacker. It seems that the cache totally filled up & caused the web site to have a blank page after clicking the "Checkout" button (catalog/shopping_cart.php). Fortunately the systems guys at my hosting service found the problem & removed all the trash in the cache so the web site is operational again, but the fact that the latest version of Ultimate SEO URLs 5 PRO (Release 205) apparently still has a problem with resetting the cache. I have added the function tep_reset_cache_data_seo_urls (found on page 2 of this forum) to the bottom of catalog/admin/includes/functions/general.php but there is also a function tep_reset_cache_data_usu5 which apparently does not work correctly. Either I need to know where to invoke the function I added or someone needs to fix the existing reset function.

I am having a problem with my web site. The last mod was Ultimate SEO URLs 5 PRO (Release 205) back on Jan 7, 2014. It apparently worked fine and I had online orders up thru 2/24/2014. I know the hosting service had a hacker attack on my server some where about that time and I suspect some code may have been changed by a hacker. I was up to the current milestone v2.3.3.4 A visitor/client can now go to the web site, select a product, view the detailed product description, click "Add to cart" button, See the what's in my cart page, click the "Checkout" button (catalog/shopping_cart.php), and then bomb off with a WHITE PAGE (Catalog/login.php). I wanted to compare my code to the (drop_on_top v2.3) code you have in release 205 but it seems that may be impossible if I have the latest milestone code and your Drop_on_top cod is back at 2.3.? Is there a drop_on_top using v2.3.3.4?

I found the instructions were easy to follow. It took me about a day but all went well. I did have a problem with two older contributions affected by the change to admin/includes/function/general.php: 1) Products-Multi did not work. The problem was the tep_array_merge function about line 220. I simply found the old version of the function, slightly renamed it, stuck it at the end of admin/includes/function/general.php, modified my program to use the new function name and it worked just fine. 2) The second problem was with Googlefeeder and a different function. After trial and error, I added this function to the end of general.php and then it worked: //// // Recursively go through the categories and retreive all parent categories IDs // TABLES: categories function tep_get_parent_categories(&$categories, $categories_id) { $parent_categories_query = tep_db_query("select parent_id from " . TABLE_CATEGORIES . " where categories_id = '" . (int)$categories_id . "'"); while ($parent_categories = tep_db_fetch_array($parent_categories_query)) { if ($parent_categories['parent_id'] == 0) return true; $categories[sizeof($categories)] = $parent_categories['parent_id']; if ($parent_categories['parent_id'] != $categories_id) { tep_get_parent_categories($categories, $parent_categories['parent_id']); } } } However my BIG concern is quite different. Like most large web sites that do blind drop ship, I load data to my web site using Easy Populate and on a regular basis I upload it to Google with Googlefeeder and I have a Google Adwords account connected to my www.google.com/merchants/merchantdashboard (my web site) and a lot of costly product listing adds. What seems to be needed now is a way to add all these wonderful SEO & Meta fields into a supported and current version of Easy Populate and Googlefeeder. Since these two contributions are not part of the milestone v2.3.3.4 my suggestion to osCommerce management is to make a v2.3.3.5 with just these two programs and make them current with the myriad of Google laws, rules, guidelines, & taxonomies. I thought I might be able to fake out these programs to believe I had added them with Add More Fields but either it doesn't work or I screwed it up. My thinking is that by using these new fields I will improve my ranking so much that I may not have to pay quite so much to Google for costly Adwords and first page ranking. To me, these 2 programs are far more important to my back pocket than anything anybody is working on that I know about. What do you think???

Actually that would be V2.3.1 (5,267,948 bytes; md5: ee581335954f64dc33167fbf949bf0c3) which works great! Every "problem" I ever had with this package was my own data entry error. Joe

My solution was easy. I scrapped all the changes I had made up until I also found the 3 or so missing referenced places to change. Since my changes were made to the "real" v2.3.1, not the version that Jack used, I simply took the version he supplied and it worked just fine. We were right but his version worked!

I have used the Add_More_Fields contribution successfully to add five fields for the Product Table. These appear to actually be loaded physically in the Add_More_Fields Table as opposed to physically in the Product Table. I had used the option to add these to Easy Populate & it reported that this was done. With the one array line modified to allow me to enter the actual field names and the display names. I can add records with these five new fields. In the contribution "Satisfying Google/base with the v2.3.1 DB and EasyPopulate" you replied "The answers are here but you don't seem to want to accept them. Install Add More Fields, or some other contribution if you prefer, add the fiels to Easy Populate (Add More Fields does that for you), enable the option to use the fields in the google feeder file (the names of the database fields have to match) and you're all done. " I seem to be missing the step that allows me to run the Easy Populate creating a Froogle file on the fly and have it get my 5 new fields out of the Add_More_Fields table instead of the real Product Table. When you say "the names of the database fields have to match" do you mean that, as an example, I should have added a field called "product_type" instead of "producttype" and "google_product_category" instead of "googleproductcategory" and "condition" instead of "conditions"? Also please explain where you "add the fields" for Easy Populate since it is a program/script and not a table. There is a pretty good paragraph entitled "BEGIN Define Custom Fields for your products database" around line 250 in Easy Populate. It seems to me that the EP program is looking for new fields physically in the Product Table, not Add_More_Fields fields for the Product Table which are physically in the Add_More_Fields table. Thanks

From what I can see & understand, if I follow the comments in 2.76i of Easy Populate, only two changes are necessary to implement Products Short Descriptions: 1) Add a new data field: v_products_short_description_1 2) Change line 301 to look like 288 omitting the // Unfortunately, when I do this I get an error 1054 Unknown column 'products_short_description' in 'field list' I suspect something else needs to be changed because without the field being added and without the change at 301 it works just great. Any ideas? (PS I only want suggested changes to 2.76i - Thanks Joe

I am using 2.76i. I finally figured out how to get the Product Special Price to work every time. Take one small group of products and do a download on the fly. I turn on every option except attributes. This will create a CSV file. Elsewhere I build an EP file to upload. My last step is to copy column by column from the EP data created elsewhere into the the downloaded file. Really all I needed was the header. When this file is uploaded with special prices they work just fine, but if I had tried to upload the data I created elsewhere, then the special price does not show up in the new product. Two things to watch for are excess blank category fields that can be deleted from the downloaded file and there will be no HTC fields downloaded, but they can be add to the uploaded file which is in essence just the saved header with new data added in column by column. Uploading 1000 records at a time works just fine for me. The latest version by Surfalot (2.76i)works quite well and it has some suggested code for those of us who have implemented the Cieto Featured Products contribution. I made a temp version of 2.76i and tried to carefully make the suggested changes and I really thought it might work. It did not work for me. So I took the Products Short Description field out of my data and went back to 2.76i. If anyone anywhere in the world has modified 2.76i and can upload Products Short Description I would sure like to hear from you and get a copy of you code. Also, if anyone anywhere in the world has modified 2.76i to get the 3 HTC fields to download I would sure like to hear from you and get a copy of you code.

I still have two or three significant issues (problems) with Easy Populate after using (latest version 2.76i) for several years on 2 separate web sites. In the larger web site (AlphaNautical.com), for one distributor (as an example), I begin with a 53 KB EP file with 28,798 products in Excel 97-2003 format (Sheet 1). This file is copied and put in a new file (in Excel 97-2003 format) in order to change from a relative to an absolute format. (I use a lot of fields to the right of the EOREOR field in order to concatenate a nicer format description field.) Then all data past the EOREOR field is chopped off. Prior to making any mass load, my norm is to make several test runs with anywhere from 5 to 50 products until the newly built test products look OK. The source data in Excel 97-2003 format is converted to CSV format for input to EP. This is where the 1st problem arises. (My standard setting are: 1) Magic Quotes: Off; 2) Register Global: Off; 3) Replace Quotes: False; 4) Field separator: Comma; 5) Safe Output: True; 6) Preserve Tab/CR/If: False; 7) Enable Attributes: True & 8) SEF URLS: False. I only use one "Other Support" Option: HTC: True. Note that SPPC is False.) Every field uploads EXACTLY as loaded EXCEPT v_products_special_price. If this is a "new" record the resulting special price is blank (but should contain valid data). If this is an "update" to an existing record, then the result is a special price that was in the product before, not the new price that was uploaded. Now what is really strange is The following. I can then download these same new test records as a CSV file. Next I copy a column from the original test data (remember it did not work before) into the newly created download file and re-run it as an update. Surprise! You guessed it. The special prices work just fine, but problem 2 arises. Remember the HTC option is turned on but the three HTC fields do not get downloaded. As you can see quite easily, I have to upload the 28,000 records at about 1000 records at a time. Then I have to download the entire 28,000 records as a CSV file. Next I take the the special prices directly from the file that did not work and place the in the newly downloaded file. And finally, I upload them again but without attributes and HTC data fields. The 3rd issue/problem is caused by not having an optional switch and field to upload the "Products Short Description" field which is created in the Cieto Featured Products contribution. (I used version v2.54 MS2). (The "Pros" are that this is a very useful sales tool that randomly "features" your products. The "Cons' are that this requires extensive and careful modification to the (large) admin/catalog program.) Because it has such good sales benefits I recommend it to the careful programmer but not to newbies. After doing all the gyrations cited above, next it is necessary to go back through 28,000 records manually to fix this one field. I hope this prompts the release of a "j" version or someone spots my problem and tell me how to fix the special price upload problem. Thanks jestep

Ok - I am including access to 4 "005" CSV upload files at www.Alpahnautical.com/shop/ Two of these are "1-30" meaning they are small test files with 30 records. One I processed first and it included the three HTC fields. As I recollect, it did not produce Special prices, but when I uploaded the other 30 product test file with the "wo_HTC" I used the same data & deleted the three HTC fields. The Special prices immediately appeared. There is a third file with "1082" records which has been processed already. When you check the web site you will see that none of these products (other than the 30 in the test just mentioned) have a Special price. There is another larger file with about 2000+ products that I will process as when there is a solution to the Special prices problem. I could add a 5th file (if needed) for the 1082 records in the "004" format where the sequence of the fields is more like in the EP instructions as opposed to the 005 sequence which is more like you get from an on-the-fly download with everything selected except attributes. Two other "minor" things to note: a) It seems that to get the uploaded images to be turned on and visible I need to manually upload them from the local to the remote image sub-directory. It was my impression that they should be properly uploaded to the correct sub-directory in the remote images folder AND be visible. B) As I mentioned to you once before, I have the Cieto Featured products contribution installed. I have to manually update the Products Short Description for every record added. When you have the time, this would be an important addition to EP just like Linda's HTC contribution. The reason I mention this is that if the Special price worked and the 2 "minor" things also worked, I could load the 30,000 products from this current distributor with no human intervention instead of having to tweek every record. Big difference in time and money. Thanks for doing a great job on EP! jestep