Product categories

I am still in the process of getting products into my store. I have created a csv and imported the products and that works fine. the all appear in the store. The next step is categories.

I created another csv for the categories, imported that in and it is fine. The products have to be linked to the categories. 5500 products some with multiple categories leads to almost 5900 linkings. I created another csv (for the life of me I don't know why you choose to use ProductID instead of ProductSKU for the linking) for this and imported into ps3_productcategories. When I go into admin and check on the products they appear to be in the correct categories. Mind y9ou I didn't check them all but a select random handful were all correct.

Now the problem, form the site page, if I click on all products they show up but if I choose a category I get an hourglass for a few minutes then nothing. I cannot search by category.

1.) Any ideas on what might be wrong and how I can fix this.

2.) When I uploaded my products I had made the long description a larger text size but I see this has no effect on the detail description. Is there a universal category where I can set all detail descriptions to be larger or do I have to do this one at a time for each of my 5500 products?

One thing that has recently come to light is that apostrophes in the name of the category can cause problems. Do you know if this is the case for you? You can try doing a search of the info that you have to see if you can find an example of this. If you have this issue you should try replacing the apostrophe with the html entity for it like this:


replace '

with

'

Looking through my category list I have no apostrophes. I have commas, dashes, ampersands and brackets. , - & ().

Are any of those likely to cause a problem?

Okay I tried to update and redefine the products in their category list but it had no effect, so I went to the database and emptied the ps3_productcaterories table and then manually reentered the data and it works fine. The problem is, to define 5800 categories is probably a week's work doing it manually. I'm not sure why it doesn't work when I import the list as a csv. The products all show in in the correct categories but from the consumer side clicking on any category seems to freeze it for 5 minutes while it searches, then it turns up an empty field. I'm not so inclined to spend that amount of time entering these things one at a time, not if I can find another product that allows me to simply import the whole list. Any suggestions on what might be going wrong with the import of the productcategories would be appreciated.

From what you are describing about the user experience with the categories it might be possible that the query is just taking that long to execute and it times out. You can reset the timeout period in php with this code:

<?php set_time_limit(<number of seconds>); ?>

You would just enter the number of seconds that you want to let the script run for in there and test it out. If you put in a high enough value you should be able to determine if the query is just taking a long time to execute or if no results will ever be returned.