Just spent 2 days to get my products on Tickon.com listed in Googlebase. By having the products listed in googlebase, you can get additional exposure on Google’s database, as well as more opportunities for Google crawlers to find your products and link to your site. 
Since Tickon.com is still running on an older version of Magento (still need to find time to upgrade, but I am afraid of the upgrade process due to bad past experiences), the tutorial here from Magento didn’t really help. But if you are on 1.1.7, you should check out the video! They have added extra menu options in the admin page to facilitate this.
So without the automated features to export from magento and into googlebase, the process becomes a manual process of exporting out a .txt file and uploading it into googlebase. To export, you can use this workaround that I found on the Magento forum; thanks Turbo1. Simply download the gbase.php file (or view the script below), modify the path to where you want to save the file (for me, i saved it to /var/export), and simply drop the file into the Magento root folder and then access the file like this: http://www.tickon.com/gbase.php, and this would create the required .txt file into the /var/export folder.
Now that you have the file, you can simply create a datafeed in googlebase and upload the txt file. without this gbase.php file, using the default Export Magento module would be difficult, but not impossible!
Have fun. My next task…feeding the products into Feedburner.
<?php
define(’SAVE_FEED_LOCATION’,'var/export/google_base_feed.txt’);//you can set a new folder and file if you want, don’t forget to chmod the folder to 777
// make sure we don’t time out
set_time_limit(0);
require_once ‘app/Mage.php’;
Mage::app(’default’);
try{
$handle = fopen(SAVE_FEED_LOCATION, ‘w’);
$heading = array(’id’,'title’,'description’,'link’,'image_link’,'price’,'brand’,'product_type’);
$feed_line=implode(”\t”, $heading).”\r\n”;
fwrite($handle, $feed_line);
//———————- GET THE PRODUCTS
$products = Mage::getModel(’catalog/product’)->getCollection();
$products->addAttributeToFilter(’status’, 1);//enabled
$products->addAttributeToFilter(’visibility’, 4);//catalog, search
$products->addAttributeToSelect(’*');
$prodIds=$products->getAllIds();
//echo ‘Product filter: ‘.memory_get_usage(false).’<br>’;
//flush();
$product = Mage::getModel(’catalog/product’);
foreach($prodIds as $productId) {
//echo ‘. ‘;
//flush();
//echo ‘Loop start: ‘.memory_get_usage(false).’<br>’;
//flush();
//$product = Mage::getModel(’catalog/product’);
$product->load($productId);
$product_data = array();
$product_data['sku']=$product->getSku();
$product_data['title']=$product->getName();
$product_data['description']=$product->getDescription();
$product_data['link']=$product->getProductUrl();
$product_data['image_link']=Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_MEDIA).’catalog/product’.$product->getImage();
$product_data['price']=$product->getPrice();
$product_data['brand']=$product->getResource()->getAttribute(’manufacturer’)->getFrontend()->getValue($product);
$product_data['product_type']=”;
//echo ‘Product load: ‘.memory_get_usage(false).’<br>’;
//flush();
//get the product categories
foreach($product->getCategoryIds() as $_categoryId){
$category = Mage::getModel(’catalog/category’)->load($_categoryId);
$product_data['product_type'].=$category->getName().’, ‘;
}
$product_data['product_type']=rtrim($product_data['product_type'],’, ‘);
//echo ‘Category load: ‘.(memory_get_usage(false)).’<br>’;
//sanitize data
foreach($product_data as $k=>$val){
$bad=array(’”‘,”\r\n”,”\n”,”\r”,”\t”);
$good=array(”",” “,” “,” “,”");
$product_data[$k] = ‘”‘.str_replace($bad,$good,$val).’”‘;
}
$feed_line = implode(”\t”, $product_data).”\r\n”;
fwrite($handle, $feed_line);
fflush($handle);
//echo ‘Loop end: ‘.memory_get_usage(false).’<br>’;
//flush();
}
//———————- WRITE THE FEED
fclose($handle);
}
catch(Exception $e){
die($e->getMessage());
}
blog posting, e-commerce, magento, technical notes
export, google base, magento, tickon.com
Finding ways to improve on the usability of tickon.com, I have made a small improvement. I thought it was quite annoying to always have to wait for a new window to open to view the alternate images, so did some googling and found the perfect fix on Magento forum (link to exact post). This fix simply allows you to click on the thumbnail alternate images and have it be shown in the large image box above. Without going through the discussion thread…here’s the quick fix:
