The XML process should update every existing product that's included using the SKU / UPC and Title as a key.

There is only one link field supported by default but of course you could add more, or put them in the description.

Sorry Ted, not following, are you saying to re-upload the xml's, if so, will this put the product listings back into the fore of the site content as in the sideblocks for new posts and the activity page, I have just annoyed the hell out of my members by deleting all the listings and uploading the product xml's afresh, long story and rather a dull one. I shouldn't want all the Product listings to appear in the stats as new content again, I would have an uprising on my hands.

Ted, the new version of "productforums.php" works but it does not work totally because doesn't appear the custom fields. :(

If there's no new products there will be no new posts. The system updates what already exists... assuming it can find a match on the SKU or UPC that is.

Gotcha. Try this version...

/upload/productforums.php

Ah right, I didn't include the SKU's, I forgot to add them tot he xml's, and there are no UPC's to be used any way, so running the xml's again without the SKU's will cause problems!

That's a problem indeed...

Do you have reviews on any / many of the products yet?

No there aren't any reviews just yet, I just re-uploaded the xml's recently and no-one has had chance to add reviews yet, but some are due in soon.

Why not make a quick change to your XML to add in SKUs [they don't have to be real to anyone else, just a simple 001, 002, 003, ... works], delete the forum & existing products and reimport now?

This will save you a lot of headache making updates down the road.

Okay, so essentially I need to add sku's no matter what, it makes more sense to me to add the real ones, adding fake sku's would be a bit faster as I would not have to access the real ones from the source site but it feels wrong to me so I will add the real ones.

Ted, once I delete the existing Products and then import the xml's again, is there some way I can stop them from showing in the activity stream. Doing this is really going to annoy my members, it otherwise would add 395 new posts to the activity stream, I can't afford to anger my members with this again. I see I can exclude Product Reviews from the Activity Stream but I can't find any way of excluding the new threads created by the xml's in the forum specified in the core settings..

Can you exclude the forum from the stream? I've only worked with it enough to create our custom bit for reviews.

Oddly no, you would think vB would have included the option to include/exclude forums from the stream, bit stumped with this one!

Actually I'm not surprised. The activity stream is the most modular part of vB4 I've worked with and clearly just getting started... In searching for examples of mods with their own bits I found none so while I don't know that PRF is the first to get into it, it is possible.

There's no hooks for us to plug into, which is why we didn't make any exclusions in 1.3 but you can trick it manually... but it's not a solve I'd suggest.

How unique are your titles [i.e. how many overlap with other products]?

A great many have similarities, there are multitudes fot Products from the same manufacturers, IE there are several listings starting with Falcon, or Peterson and so on. I am more than a little intrigued to learn where you are going with this. :)

Well we don't have to match on SKU + Title, we could just do title but if there's products with identical titles that would cause all sorts of problems and essentially leave you with multiple items for one and no way to find what's missing.

Every Product in the xml's have their own unique title, there are similar titles but none are identical!

admincp/productforums.php

checks on title alone [be sure to test this first before running it in production!]

Hiya Ted,

I placed that in my testbed localhost site, navigated to localhost site to products, the problem still exists, when I upload an xmls to the test site every letter 'd' now has a letter 'j' following it in product titles and descriptions!

Ok but first let's see if the import update worked...

When you ran it what sort of output did you get [it should tell you if it updates or creates a product for each record].

Any duplication?

when submit a review i get an error how do i fix thanks,

Oh great, you had to go and press THAT button. There goes the whole site. Just kidding...

We had an issue posting your review because of
[ARG:2 UNDEFINED]. Try again or report this to our team and incldue code 164251-B.
:confused:

Working perfectly in the respect Ted, all Products on xml's show as Existing product... updating

It means the script wasn't able to make a thread in the review forum. Have you set a forum to go along with enabling this option? Does that forum allow posts?

Hey Ted,

by your not responding do I infer that it is safe to go ahead with the admincp/productforums.php file you provided me, what about the extra 'd' after all of the letter 'j'?

MS office does some nasty things with special characters, we'll have to work on the filtering a bit more using the version we posted for you. No reason to use it now unless you have other updates to make through XML importing.

Nothing new to import, just keen to remove that bizarre formatting from the product descriptions, looks bad is all. ;)

Hiya Ted,

please do not continue with the weird character problem, I have just discovered the problem has absolutely nothing to do with your mod at all, the problem is coming from the source data itself, the weird characters are in the data entered into the xml's when I wrote them. I took the text from the website the products are sold on and they are right there in the text on that site.

So sorry for wasting your time with this, I will notify the site owner and let him know of the problem, thank you for your continued excellent first rate support Ted.

Good to hear but I'm glad we were also able to track down your XML matching so you can get those updates in a little easier...

About to dive in on configuring this, but I had a stupid question:

You can use this with pre-existing threads, right?

Kind of a big deal for us, given that we're GARS refugees.

Products have a whole extended set of data that is displayed back so you'd have to create that manually or import it off of other products. Basically yes, but not without some work.

Thanks for the quick answer. Not being a developer, is there a guide to importing old GARS info, or even just old threads?

I have years worth of GARS reviews.

It's never even been mentioned before so sorry but no info...

I'm not familiar with GARS in the least so if you can explain how it worked [were there items, clustered reviews, single reviews, etc] I can get more specific.

GARS basically added extra fields and custom templates to a thread on a per-forum basis. It allowed you to have multiple numeric rating fields for a product (associated with a single thread). Each thread would be the "parent", and subsequent posts could either review the product by rating the various options, or just make an ordinary post.

For example, we had Martial Arts School reviews broken down with ratings such as:

*Class Size
*Equipment
*Facility
*Striking
*Grappling

All 1-10 ratings.

It was basically an overlay onto existing threads, and had options to customize the layouts of said threads. You could either use it as a Reviews, or an Article system, by customizing those meta-templates, and then assigning them to individual forums.

Here's the only screenshot of GARS that I have left; it's from a sidebar added to a forum thread displaying the ratings.

http://www.bullshido.net/images/ads/reviews.jpg

On a personal note, it boggles my mind why this hasn't been remade or even incorporated into VB itself. When we upgraded to 4.0, we essentially turned thousands of reviews into ordinary forum threads, because we lost GARS.

Ted are there any upgrade instructions? I am running the previous version or previous two version. Basically the version before you added images on the view forum bit lol

Upload all the files. Import the new product file. And if desired run the image sync routine in the AdminCP options. That's it.

And oh, if you have modified templates prepare to merge them.

I can't find the image sync...?

Ok I managed to get the image sync thing to work, however I don't see any images on the view forum bit, it looks as if it did before.

http://www.midwiferyonline.co.uk/productforums.php

http://www.midwiferyonline.co.uk/forums/7-The-Library

I have now lost all my images as I deleted them from the folder then tried to resync, how ever it didnt recreate the images.

I am trying to upload new ones but jus get this error -

Product Review Forums

Warning: imagejpeg() [function.imagejpeg]: Unable to open '../productimages/502d2feb1f375_full.jpg' for writing: No such file or directory in [path]/includes/prodforums_uploader.php on line 54

Warning: imagejpeg() [function.imagejpeg]: Unable to open '../productimages/502d2feb1f375_thumb.jpg' for writing: No such file or directory in [path]/includes/prodforums_uploader.php on line 54

Warning: imagejpeg() [function.imagejpeg]: Unable to open '../productimages/502d2feb1f375_small.jpg' for writing: No such file or directory in [path]/includes/prodforums_uploader.php on line 54

Your settings are incorrect and the script can not create images. Double check the path for where images should go [you need to work from root so /home/mysite/forum/products/ or such] and set the folder to 0755 writeable.

Once that's complete and you can upload one image re-run the importer which will try to salvage the old images [if not I can show you a query to get them back and then let you import then again].

Ok the directory route is right now and I have uplaoded one image which is showing on the product itself and and the productsforum.php. However the image hasn't replaced the forum icons.

I have ran the image sync and ma missing all previous images so if you could give me that query, that would be much appreciated.

Hey there. I've been reading through and couldn't find the answer to this question.

Right now, the product reviews are sorted by the date the thread/product was created. How do I set the forum to show by latest reply and how do we get productforums.php to show a list of categories and then latest reviews below that? (Or just latest reviews?)

The first issue requires a hack as [currently] we're looking at the product table rather than the reviews one. You could either add a column for last reviewed or change the table query around to do a JOIN statement.

The second change also requires a quick hack to the code to add in the drop down list. You can basically copy how the manufacturer dropdown works or wait for the next release as this sounds like it's worth being added in.