Updated for PhoenixCart
Easy Populate (EP) was designed to provide a vehicle for moving products from one shop to another or as a means to store product sets for developers. Please keep this in mind before complaining about how it works.
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What does EP do now?
EP as progressed to a tool for exporting product details for easy editing in text or with Excel. After, we can import the product detail back into the Phoenixcart database with changes.
Easy Populate lets you quickly populate and update thousands of products in many categories for an Phoenix store with data from an; Excel spreadsheet, OpenOffice spreadsheet, Filemaker database, Access database. Any delimited text file (you can now set a configuration var for the separator character).
Easy Populate can also export sets of products based on a category, manufacturer, or the product's status (visible/not visible) for editing, moving to another site or storing.
Easy Populate supports multiple categories, multiple languages, creates Categories and Manufacturers on the fly, unlimited levels of categories/subcategories are supported, products without pictures can be defaulted to a standard "no picture available" image and file uploading via browser or grab a file from the temp directory.
What does EP *NOT* do well?
So far, EP does not handle attributes well. When viewing product export, it may be difficult to understand how it works. As such, I'do not recommend that anyone use EP for managing attributes. But is can be done if you are patient.
EP does not handle "download" attributes.
The default behavior of EP is to Add & Update. If you download a product, change its category, then upload, EP will add the product to the new category. EP will not remove it from the previous category. EP does not move products from one category to another either.
The code is improved but still needs work. The code will read the entire product database into server memory before producing the export. New features improve the export file building to avoid loading the entire export file in memory also.
Note that Easy Populate is not multilanguage. All text entries are hardcoded in English in the main files.
