Recently I’ve had to import a client’s catalog data from Excel 2007 to the Magento eCommerce Platform. The data in Excel was unsurprisingly in a format that was unsupported by Magento’s import methods. Using code, I needed to parse Excel data into the format Magento required. In PHP, I wasn’t aware of any way to interface with .xls or .xlsx files, so I tried exporting the data to flat-file CSV, where it could be easily manipulated using PHP’s native CSV functions.
Tagged :: xml
17
Jan 09
Jan 09
It’s been almost three weeks now since I’ve started learning the Magento ecommerce platform. With an impressive array of features, like product comparisons and a web services API, the platform sounds promising. I had hoped that by the time I’d revisit this topic, I’d be able to say I’ve successfully implemented the software. Instead I’m having trouble setting up my product catalog (it involves importing).  And how can I forget to mention the overall issue of speed?
Let’s start at the beginning, at installation. Your web server likely has capable hardware, so you need to be sure that your software configuration meets requirements. Luckily the host I’m on was set up just fine the way it was. Obviously you need to download the software – I chose to download the Full Release (version 1.1.8 at the time). Read more »
24
Dec 08
Dec 08
I recently had the opportunity to work on a website that used Flash as the front-end and using LAMP on the backend. At first this seemed like a daunting task, since my Flash experience (outside of creating simple animation tweens and using the software as a drawing tool) was limited to dropping the auto-generated code that Flash generates into an HTML page.
I had no experience whatsoever with interfacing Flash with the server. I was surprised to learn that the task wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d imagined. An SWF file can be set to load data from a server transparently, akin to AJAX’s behavior. The only hint of an HTTP request is seen in the browser’s status bar. Anyway, an SWF can query an XML file (or in my project’s case, XML-output generated via PHP) and parse that into objects that can be displayed to the user.
