There is a new addon called Data feeds under the ADDONS section.
You should install this addon first and you will see the new link “Data feeds” under the “Administration” section.
So, data feed is a group of the “rules”. For each data feed you can define some general settings, products, which will be exported, and the necessary fields, which will be used for export.
You can create any number of feeds. And now you can just click the export link and get the products (download, export to server or upload to FTP), which you defined before in this data feed.
Also, you can use CRON to export products by the timeline. You should select the type of the cron export for your data feeds and use the following line to run the script according to schedule:
This is probably going to sound pretty newbie, but could someone please explain what data feeds are. I take it that data feeds send data to somewhere, but where is somewhere? I haven’t ever done any blogging, twittering, facebook, or etc. so maybe this is why I don’t understand?
Regarding the data feed - there needs to be a few extra options.
The first obvious one is that there is no way to map to either the SEO friendly url or the messy URL for a product or category. Both mapping options should be available as google base does not allow you to post a product URL that performs a redirect, etc.
The second is that sometimes we may need to export a field that doesn’t necessarily vary and so we need to also be able to export placeholder constants.
For example, google base product feeds require the field ‘condition’ which is generally either used or new. I have to create a hidden product feature and populate it for all products just to map this through the feed. It would be better if I could assign a value to a field - so that instead of having to create a useless field for me in order to map, I can just set the value for all rows in the feed manually.
[quote name=‘jagorny’]For example, google base product feeds require the field ‘condition’ which is generally either used or new. I have to create a hidden product feature and populate it for all products just to map this through the feed. It would be better if I could assign a value to a field - so that instead of having to create a useless field for me in order to map, I can just set the value for all rows in the feed manually.[/QUOTE]
The Google base export already does this along with the option to choose URL format. However, I think you are right that these should be integrated into the data feeds addon which would make the Google base export redundant.
we actually wrote a couple of data feeds for CS cart among them data feeds for shopping.com, myshopping.com.au you can have a look at www.module-shop.com
Our XML Data Feeds addon does all of the above. Since it generates XML data, there is no reason you couldn’t add special XLS processing before passing along to Google or other shopping aggregators. Info on the addon can be viewed at:[url]http://www.ez-ms.com/addonproducts/xml-data-feeds.html[/url]. Docs are in the attachments tab.
of course, but it’s important for me to generate multiple datafeeds for each aggregators with custom fields and possibility to send file on FTP for each aggregators.
I thought you wanted to run XSLT on the XML before sending to your aggregators.
Unfortunatley no one can know your custom fields and providing for them adds a lot of complexity to a product and also creates a giant support nightmare.
The two file formats we support should be covered by any other aggregator that is serious about getting a lot of merchants. Hard to go wrong with Yahoo and Google.
But if your needs are beyond this and you can’t use XSLT to modify those XML files then I guess you’ll have to come up with a custom solution.
Does anyone know how to get the id into the data feed addon’s export?
The id is part of the Google Base export feature, but is not an option when building a new data feed.
Google requires this attribute in order for the data feed to be accepted. This seems to be an automatically generated number by the system since there is no place to enter in this information.
Here is Google’s explanation as to what an id is:
id [id]
A unique alphanumeric identifier for each item- e.g. your internal ID code.
IMPORTANT:
Once an item is submitted the unique id cannot change when you update your data feed.
Item identifiers must be unique within your account. If you have multiple feeds, items within different feeds must still have a unique identifier.