markomedia - web development

Following my post on Zen Cart friendly URLs, I would now like to give VirtueMart some love.

I’ve been looking for ways to export Categories and Products from Zen Cart and bulk insert them into VirtueMart.  Wishful thinking? That’s what I thought after googling for a solution and couldn’t find anything that’s convincing and, of course, free.

This motivated me to download a free version of CSV Improved component for VirtueMart and have a look at the csv format required for importing products into VM.  After a bit of head scratching I’ve come up with a pretty simple Zen Cart export tool that’s very primitive, but worked nicely for me. It can certainly save you days/months of manual data entry, depending on the number of products you have. Keep in mind that this tool will only export Categories and Products. If you need to export other stuff, you’ll have to extend this code a little bit. More info in readme.txt.

Download a copy of ZenCartToVirtueMartCSV.

This little script can definitely be improved, but it is all I have time for.  Feel free to modify it and use it as a base for something more sophisticated.

Happy Exporting
Marko

I’ve been exploring Zen Cart shopping cart for a long time and one thing that, I thought, needed improvement was the support for friendly URLs. Ultimate SEO URLs break my site and I needed another solution. I found this little beauty called Simple SEO URL and it works beautifully.  It’s a little tricky to set up, but it’s worth the effort.  Installation process will take you about 15-20 minutes.
I use Zen Cart 1.3.8a and SSU 3.8.3. If you have different version(s) the following steps may not work.

Download Simple SEO URL

Requirements
1. PHP 5
2. mod_rewrite enabled on your Apache web server
3. Zen Cart Module Manager installed

Installation
1. Unzip and upload your files to web server
2. Go to Admin==>Extras==>SSU Manager
3. Open path_to_store/.htaccess and add:

If your .htaccess file already has stuff in it, do not overwrite it. Simply append the following:

#### BOF SSU
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
# Change "/zencart/ to the correct setting
# if your site is located at root folder, then you should have RewriteBase /
# Go to your include/configure.php, this value should be the same with the value of DIR_WS_CATALOG
RewriteBase /zencart/
 
# Deny access from .htaccess
RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
 
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule .* - [L]
 
RewriteRule ^(.+) index.php/ [E=VAR1:,QSA,L]
#### EOF SSU

Make sure your “RewriteBase” path is correct.
4. Set path_to_cache_folder/ssu and its subfolders permission to 0777
5. Now go to Admin==>Configuration==>Simple SEO URL to enable and configure your friendly URLs.

That’s it.  You can also test your installation http://yoursite/ssu_check.php after which you can remove ssu_check.php from your server.

Marko

I’ve been quiet on the blog front for a while.  I was having a rough time scuba diving in the tropics and so on… If you’re interested, take a look at some of my holiday pics I uploaded on facebook.

Now back to business.

At Learnosity, I’ve been working on migrating our core Flex 3 app to Flex 4.  One of the problems I encountered was embedding an external swf file into the main app. I was getting the following error:

#1053 Illegal override of activate in mx.managers.SystemManagerProxy

It turned out that my Flex 4 app didn’t like the external swf because it was compiled with SDK 3.0.  Sounds obvious, but it took me half a day to figure it out  I compiled my external swf with SDK 4.0 and everything worked beautifully.

So the lesson learnt is that if your app has other project dependencies, make sure they are all compiled with the same SDK version and you should be sweet.

Marko