Integrating Woocommerce with diamond data from Rapnet or IDEX
Many jewelry web-sites developed on Woocommerce ( A WordPress e-commerce plugin) require integrating diamond data from diamond trading exchanges like Rapnet , IDEX, MID or Polygon.
Unlike Magento Opencart or Prestashop which are built ground up for e-commerce, Woocommerce is a plugin on WordPress blog framework , to improvise it to ecommerce store.
Essentially the “posts” in WP are altered by woocommerce to show as items/products, this makes it restrictive for customization. Furthermore for massive diamond trading data (typically Rapnet feed may go into 50,000+ diamonds) with numerous diamond specific attributes like carat weight, color, fluorescence, clarity, cut etc; integration becomes complex.
As a specialist in Diamond Jewelry websites ; Transpacific regularly receives project requests to integrate Woocommerce or WP-ecommerce with Rapnet data as well as to build front end diamond search interface for build a ring feature.
The biggest problem: Inserting bulk (more than 100k)records in Woocommerce-WP
a) Prepare the database to handle additional diamond attributes
CSV format Diamond data is downloaded from trading exchanges like Rapnet/IDEX/ Polygon or MID.
Unlike a other products a diamond has many specialized attributes including cut, Florescence, table , symmetry etc. all these are necessary for creating front end “diamond search engine”
So the first step to prepare database, is by creating additional tables for diamond specific attributes to be joining to posts table with “post ID
b)CSV parsing and inserting extensions
WP has few good quality extensions available for CSV import . However most of them could not go beyond inserting 10k+ products.
During our testing all of these flashed
“Fatal error: Allowed memory size Exhausted”
This happens due to WP native data insert functions to insert product data including wp_insert_post();
Consume extensive server memory ; by the time they reach 8K-10K product inserts “memory exhausted error shows up”
Out-of-Box approach for 100K CSV data insert
An out of box approach had to be taken for inserting 100K products by developing a separate custom plugin which parsed the csv files through Core PHP queries .TransPacific’s specialized module efficiently inserts about 100K product records in about 17-20 minutes.
Front end diamond search engine:
Front end Diamond search engines forms an integral part of the Diamond web-site. A spate WP plugin had to be built for diamond search which queries more than 100,000 diamond records on more than 10 filtering criterions.
A demo is available on http://www.techtps.com/woo/?post_type=loosediamonds