I am working on a solution to automate the creation of CSV files for importing products to Magento using Google Spreadsheet service.
The motivation for doing that is to give a merchant a simple tool to create and update its store catalog without the needing to know anything about product attributes, store ids, website ids, separate stings inside the same cell (like category list, simple product) etc.
The staring point of this is a set of spreadsheets that will act as lookup tables and will provide data for validate content inside the products spreadsheet: - Attributes - with a column for each product attribute that is required for creating a new product like status, is_in_stock, visibility, store, website, product_type - ConfigAttributes - with a column for each configurable attribute (color, size) and it's values - AttributeSets - with following columns: attribute_set, based_on, attributes - Categories - with following columns: category_name, category_id
Next we will take the advantage of Google Apps Script to do the hard work for us: Create a product import template spreadsheet for each product type (simple, configurable etc.). The column names for each template will be store inside a JSON object:
var Mage = {
SpreadsheetTemplate : {
SimpleProducts : {
Columns : ['sku', 'name', 'attribute_set']
},
ConfigurableProducts : {
Columns : ['sku', 'name', 'attribute_set', 'config_attributes']
}
}
}
The script will prompt a dailog box asking for which attribute set should it create the template. This information will be used in order to create additional columns and data vlidation dropdowns for the spreadsheet.
There is more but I think you can get the general idea.
What do you think about this direction?
If you think it's a good idea I will be happy if you can join me creating this tool.
