Ubercart

I am having an issue with this module. When I navigate to the google_base.xml file nothing is showing, basically it is just a white page with no source what so ever. I downloaded and installed and configured it. The site I am working on is http://www.supplylinkusa.com/. So the files location would be http://www.supplylinkusa.com/products/google_base.xml. This module would be a life saver, and I really appreciate all of the hard work that has gone into it. Please let me know if there is anything you can see that I may have configured wrong. Thanks, Jonny.

I got it partially working. Thank you c0psrul3 for your help. I got the file.
It looks good and each product have title, description and link to the product.
However the following parameters required by google base are missing:
sale price, image, location, condition, weight,....
I was using
Google Base Feed Version 2.3.1, Drupal 6.13, Ubercart 2.rc6.
Any suggestions?

Suggest changing line 92 from;

$output .= "<link>" . $GLOBALS['base_url'] . '/node/' . $product->nid . "</link>\n";

to

$output .= "<link>" . $GLOBALS['base_url'] . '/' . drupal_get_path_alias("node/" . $product->nid) . "</link>\n";

This will use the alias for the product link rather than the normal drupal path (/node/node-id). I believe if aliases are not being used then the normal path will be returned by the function but I have not tested this to be certain.

I am too having problems with the output. I get the Product Title, and Body. Nothing else. I have Drupal 6.13 with uber cart 6.x-2.0-rc3

I've searched for a bit and can't seem to find a resolutions. This seems to be the only place that has even the latest information on a Google Base Integration with Drupal and or xml. Am I looking i the right spot? Any suggestions?

Thank you

Confirmed. Your fix worked great for us.

Cheers

Bizarely, the module does not create a physical file on the server, So i added this functionality.
Another problem is that it does not message the user on problems or success of the XML RSS feed creation, I added this functionality.
The module creates the xml output by calling the rss file through http, I added the functionality of creating the file at any desired folder by pressing a button, or by turning on a daemon application adjustable to create the xml feed automatically every as many hours as the user specifies.

Furthermore this module seemed like an ideal vehicle for the creation of a website xml sitemap used by google bots and others so I added this feature , and an extra button which creates the xml sitemap.

I will post the improved version if anyone wants it ..

Thank you zazagabore, great job and news.
With this changes, google base will pick up the physical file
automatically. It does not work without physical file right now.
Could you post a new version?
Is it possible to create the xml feed automatically every cron run?
What daemon application do you use to do it right now?
Is this daemon application included in the Drupal or Ubercart core?
Thank you again.

I have done some experiment yesterday. I have saved manually google_base.xml and pointed the Google base file Auto uploader to it. And it worked. It never worked without saving a physical file in advance. Does anybody have success with Google base file Auto uploader without saving physical file?

Can't seem to import products to Google Base, because of the following:

Invalid location value in attribute: location (77 errors)

Please include a street, city, county, postcode and country, in that order, separated by commas. Also make sure that you are able to validate your locations through Google Maps.

Seems that it needs all these fields rather than just street, city and zip.

Hey arcos I made a change very similar to yours, my code is:

$output .= "" . $GLOBALS['base_url'] .'/'. $product->path . "\n";

This code works very well for me. Which do you think is more correct?

I also made a lot of other changes to my code to get the google base feed working properly. For one, check_plain() is a poor function to use because it doesn't actually strip out the bad characters that google base doesn't support in the xml feed. Rather, it converts them to other characters that google base doesn't support. So really use of that function is an epic fail. I searched long and hard to find a good function that will strip out all the characters perfectly every time and stumbled across some code under GPL on the zen-cart forums in this thread: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67850&page=134

I've tested the code and it works beautifully. You need to replace calls to check_plain with google_base_xml_sanitizer.
Code:

    function google_base_xml_sanitizer($str, $cdata = false) {
      $_strip_search = array("![\t ]+$|^[\t ]+!m",'%[\r\n]+%m'); // remove CRs and newlines
      $_strip_replace = array('',' ');
      $_cleaner_array = array(">" => "> ", "®" => "", "®" => "", "™" => "", "â„¢" => "", "\t" => "", "    " => "");
      $str = html_entity_decode($str);
      $str = strtr($str, $_cleaner_array);
      $str = preg_replace($_strip_search, $_strip_replace, $str);
      $str = strip_tags($str);
      $str = eregi_replace("[^[:alnum:][:space:].,!()'-_/+=?äÂÄöÖüÜß]", "", $str);
      $str = utf8_encode(htmlentities($str));
      $str = str_replace('&', '&', $str);
      $str = str_replace(array("®", "©", "™"), array('(r)', '(c)', '(tm)'), $str);
      $out = "";
      $length = strlen($str);
      for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
        $current = ord($str{$i});
        if (($current == 0x9) || ($current == 0xA) || ($current == 0xD) || (($current >= 0x20) && ($current <= 0xD7FF)) || (($current >= 0xE000) && ($current <= 0xFFFD)) || (($current >= 0x10000) && ($current <= 0x10FFFF))) {
          $out .= chr($current);
        } else {
          $out .= " ";
        }
      }
      $str = trim($out);
      $str = str_replace(array("<", ">"), array("<", ">"), $str);
      if ($cdata) {
        $str = '';
      } 
      return $str;
    }

I made a lot of other minor tweeks to help optimize my feed. I made the static across my products - because I have a lot of taxonomy associated with my products and so the default of splitting the taxonomy for the term didn't work out well for rankings.

This module is now functional but in order to be more useful I suggest that we build a few more things into this module. We should have fields on the nodes of each product to be able to add attributes to each product for things like "Brand" (much in the way that google base integration does.

Another thing I did was create an exclusion list so that you could specify which products to leave out of the feed:

$exclusions = array('product1', 'product2', etc...)

   if(!in_array($product_path, $exclusions))
   {
    // Build google base rss
     $output .= "\n";

OH and I almost forgot. I removed the line with g:department because that is a bogus product field. I suppose it could be modified to c:department (custom field)... but it is not an actual google product field - so I removed it entirely.

Hope this helps! If anyone is interested in having me be a sponsor or maintainer on this package shoot me a pm... I feel like there is still a lot of room for improvement with this module.

The issue was that I am running a site with over 40000 nodes, and for this script to work I would have to set my memory limit super high. The module works though.

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/url/6

Like for the link element:

$output .= "" . url('node/' . $product->nid, array('absolute' => true)) . "\n";

With the url() call the path is translated if custom path exist, with the 'absolute' => true option the hostname is also added to the url i we don't have to check GLOBALS.

Nice module, it deserves to be in a drupal project page in order to submit patches and track bugs.

Thanks in advance on any help given on this issue.

I have installed the uc_google_base 2.3.1 module but when I go to
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/products/google_base.xml
In firefox
I get the following error

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/products/google_base.xml
Line Number 1, Column 1:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Google chrome and Internet explorer say the page cannot be found.

Drupal 6.16
Ubercart 2.2
uc_google_base_2_3_1

Any insight on this would be very grateful. Thanks

Just wanted to post more info on my issue incase someone could help.

I have another store that has the same versions of Drupal, Ubercart and the uc_google _base module on the same server, with 3000 items it everything works fine.
The problem website has 8000 items

Drupal 6.16
Ubercart 2.2
uc_google_base_2_3_1
Godaddy shared Linux hosting

I have created a custom php5.ini file
and added the lines

max_execution_time = 5000
max_input_time = 5000
memory_limit = 508M
post_max_size = 192M
upload_max_filesize = 192M
session.cache_expire = 18000

Im still getting the same error

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/products/google_base.xml
Line Number 1, Column 1:

http://clonedmeat.info/phpinfo.php

http://clonedmeat.info/php5.ini

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

First, excellent module. I echo the sentiment that it would be nice to move it over to drupal.org as an "official" module.

I'm having a small issue, and wondering if anyone here has any ideas. The sites I am working on are connected via domain access, and the google base module tries to pull all products across all domains. Do you know how to limit this so it will only work with the domain it is running on (i.e. site1.com/products/google_base.xml would only have products from site1, and site2.com/products/google_base.xml would only have products from site2)?

Many thanks,

Steve
www.webgeeksforhire.com

I took a few days off to create a state of the art new RSS Feed and xml sitemap module, it is (just about) based on this module.
It allows you to easily choose which elements to include in the feed, it creates physical RSS file stored in your server as well as http Rss access
The new module enables a great degree of customisation, and has the intelligence for example to exclude empty nodes.

I am in the last stages of testing it, and will be submitting it as a new module, since it is way too different to be considered an improvement of this module.

Hang in there folks, the new module is on its way ....

Any Suggestions ? Please make suggestions now (within week)

Von Gunther.

Von Gunther, thank you very much for this - looking forward to this.

The only suggestion I have, if you aren't already doing it, is I'd love the ability to add different feeds, so I can have one for google base, and another for price grabber, etc.

You rock, thanks a lot.

Thanks Scarr, I was just thinking about it last night, great suggestion, it literally takes 15 minutes to implement , a bit longer to find out the standards (format of feed) that pricegrabber expects,....

I do not want to make it difficult or confusing for users, thats why I have left out various enhancements, but your suggestion is too usefull to skip.

The sitemap creation functionality allows users to include other parts of the website than the store cataloque, it is so much simpler yet equally effective than the drupal XML sitemap module.

I am hooking the application to cron, which will create the sitemap and RSS feed when it runs, the user can also sirectly create them from the admin console, or a user can receive them by either pointing to a virtual http file (up to date info) , or the physical file in the server (created by admin or cron).

Hello,

I am working on a modification to this module that lets you select a vocabulary to limit google base to when outputting taxonomy terms. In my case, I have a site that needs to have a different vocabulary for google base than it does for the site itself. This allows me to limit it to the specified vocabulary rather than printing out all available vocabularies.

When it is a little better refined, I will post up the relevant code.

Sean

In the 'new module' you can choose not to include taxonomy in the google base RSS feed, which solves this problem.

I understand that foreign language taxonomies will be confusing to (english) google, and the need arises to translate the taxonomy, similar to having a second translated taxonomy for google.

Non intuitive/standard taxonomies present the same problem too.

This module is now part obsolete as google will reject the RSS feed, there is a new requirement that all Google base RSS feeds must specify the condition of the item.

I have incorporated this facility in the new module coming up, I am now adding the facility to create multiple feeds.

This module is now part obsolete as google will reject the RSS feed, there is a new requirement that all Google base RSS feeds must specify the condition of the item.

I have incorporated this facility in the new module coming up, I am now adding the facility to create multiple feeds.

I have released a new module here : http://www.ubercart.org/project/uc_website_xml

It creates RSS feed for google base and other search engines and price comparison websites, additionally it creates a sitemap .
Indispensable tools for any website .

Von Gunther.

I have released a new module here : http://www.ubercart.org/project/uc_website_xml

It creates RSS feed for google base and other search engines and price comparison websites, additionally it creates a sitemap .
Indispensable tools for any website .

Von Gunther.

Thank you Von Gunther!

This module only works with UC 1? You don't have any plans on making it compatible with 2, do you?

Thanks for all the hard work - I'll be checking it out soon.

Steve

I see this is compatible with Ubercart V1

Any Plans for Ubercart V2 and Drupal 6 ? Or is it also compatible with these versions.
Thanks

It works with Drupal 6 and Ubercart 2 -

Thanks for clearing that up and adding it ( V2 Compatible) to your module release page. I will be trying it out tonight.

If node revisions is on uc_product will have multiple rows for the same noe. I fixed by amending the query:

$result = db_query("SELECT distinct(node.nid) FROM {uc_products} INNER JOIN {node} ON uc_products.nid = node.nid WHERE node.status = 1");

sorry this comment's in the wrong thread and I'm not sure how to delete comments

Did you ever get a reply on this?
Also, specifically what issues did you have with the node revisions, it seems like this has been worked on before: http://www.ubercart.org/forum/bug_reports/1904/uc_product_default_displa...

Im using the uc_google_base 2.3.1 module and it works great
Unercart 2.2
Drupal 6
Looks like Google did a change to their attributes

Here is the error I am getting

Unrecognized attribute: department (8599 warnings)
Your feed contains an attribute name our system doesn't recognize. Please verify your attribute name as necessary, and please be aware that this attribute may no longer be included in our Feed Specification.

Looks like this has been changed to product type [product_type]
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=188494

Can someone please tell me the correct code to add to the module that will replace the existing line that says
$output .= "" . check_plain(implode(',', $terms)) . "\n";

I have tried

$output .= "" . check_plain(implode(',', $terms)) . "\n";

But the XML comes back blank

As well can someone tell me how to add stock.

Thanks in advance for any help on this matter.

I guess Google has changed their feed specs
He is the error I am getting
Unrecognized attribute: department (8599 warnings)
For more details on the status of your data feed, go to http://www.google.com/merchants/showfeedsummary?fid=3204011

So I looks like (department) has been replaced with (product_type]

Here is the original line of code in the Uc_Google_Base. Module V 2.3.1
$output .= "" . check_plain(implode(', ', $terms)) . "\n";

I have changed this line to read the following but cannot get it to work. It only brings back a blank XML file
$output .= "" . check_plain(implode(', ', $terms)) . "\n";

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance
Ubercart 2.2
Drupal 6

Is it possible to create a Drupal.org project for this module?

That way this module can be updated via Drush and we can be notified that there are updates available through the Available Updates mechanism that is now in Drupal 6.x

Is it possible that this module can be updated with Google's new requirements for Google Base?

I received this email within a couple of days ago.

Thank you for participating in Google Product Search. We are reaching out to you to inform you about important changes we’re making to our Product Search attribute requirements for unique identifiers and tax and shipping information.

Starting May 3rd, 2011, we’ll require your product listings to include at least two of the three unique identifiers (Brand, MPN, GTIN). In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our "product pages", where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. While these attributes will not be required for your data feed to process correctly, they may prevent your items from appearing in Product Search results if not included. For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160161

Starting June 6th, 2011, we’ll also require your product listings to include tax and shipping information to provide buyers with important price information. This information will be required at either the account or item level (in the “tax” or “shipping” attribute) in order for your items to process and appear in Google Product Search results. For instructions on how to include tax and shipping information, please visit http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160162

Hi,

I'm getting the following error when I navigate to my feed page:

error on line 2 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document

Google base seems to have stopped adding new products too.

Any ideas?

I'm using version 2.3.1

I have a question on bringing a field of data I created into my Drupal 6/ Ubercart 2 store into my Google Base datafeed that is created at this link
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/products/google_base.xml

As of May 5th Google is requiring Isbn or Upc codes to go along with the products to process the feed correctly. I am using the Google Base Rss Feed 2.3.1
that I downloaded from
http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/11593
and it has worked great for years.

Here is what I have done. I have created the field_upc field by going to
Administer > Content Management > Content Types> Products>Manage fields>Add new field
See Image
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/feed-images/product-add-upc-field.jpg
It is called upc_field and its type is set to text

Then I set it permissions for the field
See Image
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/feed-images/permissions.jpg

This automatically created my database tables. I then Imported in all my 8000 Plus UPC codes into the Sql database successfully.
Now every product shows the correct UPC code on each product page through the entire store.
See Image
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/feed-images/database-field.jpg

So everything is good to this point. The issue is that I cannot figure out the correct code to add to
the uc_google_base.module to populate the UPC codes from the database, into the datafeed.

The line of code in question is
$output .= "" . $product->field_upc . "\n";
The code for the module itself can be located at this link
http://discounthuntingsupplies.net/module.txt

Any help would be most appreciated

I've noticed the new Google requirement too, and looked into this and it appears that this module is not being updated (abaondoned).

I've posted previously (above) in the comments here requesting that this be moved to a drupal.org project so that it can be updated via drush and any available updates show up in admin\available updates.

I just wanted to point out that there are 2 other projects that also seem to be no longer maintained.

The first drupal.org project is called "Google Base" and is located here -> http://drupal.org/project/googlebase - which seems to be abandoned (see my questions in the issue queue), and I'm not even sure that it works with Ubercart.

The second drupal.org project is called "Ubercart Google Merchant Integration" and is located here -> http://drupal.org/project/uc_gbase. It also seems abandoned. It seems that this is specifically meant to work with Ubercart and it appears that there is some traffic in the issue queue and at least some interest in taking over the module by potential maintainers.

I suggest that we point all interested to the "Ubercart Google Merchant Integration" (http://drupal.org/project/uc_gbase) module for the following reasons:

A) it is meant to work with Ubercart
B) It is already a drupal.org project meaning that new code commits can be added easily and end-users can get updates via Drupal's admin\available updates interface, and can be updated via Drush.
C) There appears to be interest in maintaining it

If someone wants to maintain this module, and/or potentially aggregate all 3 projects and take the best code/features of each, you get my vote!

I've posted questions in the googlebase and uc_gbase projects already and I've posted messages here in the Ubercart.org contrib so that this duplication of abandoned projects gets noticed by anyone either trying to fix the modules due to the new Google requirements, or just starting out with an Ubercart site and wanting to add Google base support.

The http://www.onthemat.com/products/google_base.xml feed is not uploading into google merchant.

What am i doing wrong?