We started this blog/website/store with the idea of keeping with my mashup philosophy of mixing blogs, pages, products, etc all together, and leaving the sifting to the the user to target using either menus or other.

One major piece missing was some method of handling ALL the thousands of items we would be placing here online for sale, or the SOLD items for historical info. Every posting you see up till about a week ago was done by hand.

Well… not exactly by hand… We keep our products info in a database which has been custom built and allows us to input our info into WordPress with just about 6 clicks of the mouse per item… but still each item had to be input individually. If a major change, say in SHIPPING FEES came up… we’d have to go back and manually update each and every item.
Even with a simplified 6-click system, you can see that adds up to about 7300 clicks for the items we have up now… and it would only get worse over time. A solution had to be found.

But…. “We do Websites” so there had to be a better solution.

After digging around all the websites looking for simple importers I came up empty handed. Found very few that would work at all.. and even fewer that I could customize to handle OUR specific needs. What good is a tool if you can’t use it to do what you want?

So…. Vince set about creating our very own WordPress Importer.
It took a couple of days to get it right, and a week to debug and test under all conditions, but glad to announce that we now have a working IMPORTER. No more hand-jobs for us!

From now on, we can do anything we want in our database, make changes to 1000 items, and then we simply hit a button and update our wordpress blog in a few seconds.

it does allow for some pretty fancy footwork.
Like.. choosing all items with “glass” in the title, and putting them on “sale”, exporting from dbase, and uploading to wordpress — a 5 minute procedure at most. This for whether it’s 5 items, or 5000.
In fact we no longer actually POST items for sale on wordpress, we just upload a new products listing each day in wordpress.

So look for some exciting new sales, special offers, on special items, specific categories and more — all coming soon to Green Spot Antiques care of our fancy dancy importer — thanks to Vince.

Go ahead, you can cheer!
And if you want one of your own, just see our “We do Websites” page”, and shout out to Vince… happy to quote you on your specific needs.

This entry was posted on September 2, 2010 ... filed under Vinces Blog