The products are there and work fine. If I click on show all products they show up almost immediately. It's only if I click on any category that they fail to show up. It gets busy for 5 minutes then finally comes back empty. There is something about uploading the ps3_productcategories that does me in.
To answer the question of the form for uploading the data it's a csv spreadsheet. You do this through phpMyAdmin on the server. You will find your Power Store database there and there are three main tables that need to be filled. The ps3_categories I did not upload but rather did that one manually. The next one is the ps3_products table. Opening this table will show you the fields or columns that need to be populated. Ignore the first one, ProductID. That's a system number. All the others have to be filled out. I tried it with only a few columns intending to later go back and fill in other columns but I could only get it to append the data. So I had to wipe it out and start over. I'm sure there's a way to fill out part of the table and go back later and do the rest but that knowledge is beyond me.
One of the things I learned is to make sure I put a 1 in the ProductLive column. The point of uploading is so you don't have to go to each and every product to set its status.
Using a spreadsheet you head each column with the name of the column heading from the database table. You then fill in the information, save as a csv and in phpmyadmin open the table you want the information in ps3_products and import.
The other table you want to condiser if you number in the thousands of items is the ps3_productcateroties table. This links products to categories os if you don't import this into the database you'll have to visit each product individually to connect to categories and if you're going to do that then you might as well do it all manually.
This is where I had trouble. I can see this table populated and in Power Store admin I, checking products randomly they are in the proper categories. However as I said before my store did not function beyond that point. I may try this again with a smaller table just to see if I can figure out what's going on but I'm no longer worried about it.
Creating the ps3_productcategories csv spread sheet is a lot of fun. It combines the CategoryID from the categories table and the ProductID from the products table. The CategoryID is a sequential number applied to the categories and subcategories in the order they are entered into the table. You then have to take this number and put in in a column beside each product that is in this category. It took me a day and a half, with 5500 items to get it all filled in and correct.
Good luck with it.
