Hello everybody, I am doing category mapping for my feeds, and........... What a mess, - some stores just use Categories to list items "Per product Line", some use Category to list items "Per Manufacturer", others use weird names for their categories, I mean the names are so unnatural that it takes a professional in the field a couple seconds to even understand "what did they want to say"....
So it looks like I will have to "Map" around 98% of the categories I got with my product feeds... That is over 3500 categories for only 5 stores! HELP!!!
How does everyone else deal with this?
Is it even "ok" for the script to have sooooo many mappings?
I understand... Well I dont mind the work if the import script will be able to handle all those mappings... I am starting a musical instruments site, so it is a niche website but I currently finished categorizing 1/8 of all the data and I already have 132 "mapped" categories (including brand names) and from what I see, in the end I may have around 400 to 500 categories with 2 to 7 categories mapped in to each one of them.
You think the import script will be able to continue working normally with this kind of load?
PS: I am on VPS currently...
Thanks.
Hi,
That should not be a problem; most hosting accounts have plenty of RAM available to PHP scripts. If it ever does become a problem; you will almost certainly see an error along the lines of "Memory exceeded, tried to allocate (xxxxxxxxx Bytes)". Should this be the case; let me know and I can re-work the mapping system so that it doesn't have to load the mapping table into memory.
Something else I would say; given that you are spending a lot of time on your mapping; is to make sure that you are backing up this part of the database; as you don't want to lose all your hard work if your database crashes! Do you have something like phpMyAdmin installed? Using phpMyAdmin, you can navigate to your Price Tapestry database; go to the "categories" table, and then click the "Export" tab. This will export your categories table as SQL, which you can then save to your local computer as backup...
Cheers,
David.
Hi!
Yes - it is a mess, which is why Price Tapestry doesn't support a category hierarchy which is often requested. The quality of data is barely good enough to support a single level category, never mind a hierarchy.
With regards to how people deal with it; generally I would only recommend using categories in association with mapping on a niche site; as this keeps everything manageable. If using a very large site; don't forget that you can provide a single category for an entire feed by entering a value in the box rather than using category values from the feed; so this may yield better organisation for large sites.
At the end of the day, the category feature is there if you are working with good quality data; but I wouldn't worry too much about trying to use it if the data isn't there in the first place. Remember that the big price comparison sites employ armies of people to categories and link together products!
Cheers,
David.