Hi David,
1. I have just downloaded and installed today. The search function is not working on my installtion. I create a sample XML Feed with just one item and uploaded it to the feeds directory. It was imported properly...I can see under Merchant category. But when I search the [product does not come up].
2. I am not very familiar with XML...is this the same as RSS feeds. Can I just specify the FEED URL and can the contents be picked up? What exactly do you mean by "Import products from any affiliate product datafeed"? What is the procedure for getting the contents of the affiliate data feed into the feeds directory of my installation?
3. I read that you are planning to introduce a "new update" for this software..tentatively when is it planned?
Thank you
Kartik
> planning to release a new version of the script containing the majority of the new features at the end of this month.
Awesome, keep up the good work!
Will you stick with the preview releases from now on?
Thanks, I.
Hi Kartik;
Re..
1)
I think the reason why the search is not working if you only have 1 product in your test database is because of the way MySQL's Full Text indexing works. For efficieny; words that appear in more than 50% of records are not indexed. Therefore; if you only have 1 record; all words in the product name fall into this category and therefore the search index will be empty. To test the search functionality; I would upload a feed with at least 10 product records. Browsing by merchant, category etc. is not affected by this feature.
2)
By "Importing products from any affiliate datafeed", i'm referring to Magic Parser's ability to read virtually any record based file format - as there are as many different feed formats as there are affiliate networks. Price Tapestry uses Magic Parser to import feeds; hense the claim. An affiliate datafeed is not really the same as RSS; save for the fact that some affiliate datafeeds are, like RSS, provided in an XML format. Many affiliate datafeeds use a plain text format such as CSV or Tab separated values.
With regards to the procedure for getting feeds into your feeds directory; the most basic way is to:
i) Download the feed you want to import from the affiliate network to your local computer
ii) Upload the feed via FTP into your /feeds directory.
There are other ways; in particular if you have Telnet or SSH access to your web hosting account you can "wget" or FTP feeds directly into the /feeds/ directory from your server.
3)
I'm basically working on all the features listed here at the moment, and planning to release a new version of the script containing the majority of the new features at the end of this month.
Hope this helps!
David.