Well, this is really becoming a topic as part of a series! Today's topic is going to be a little complicated, but it can really speed up any current integration's you may have between your WooCommerce and CMS/Product Management Systems you may have in place. Let me first explain my current situation.
The main issue, which turns in to a cumbersome work-around, is that our imges are all hosted on an external CDN. As I have already covered, by using the REST API, despite you give the URL for each product's image, it still uploads it to the media library. This comes at a cost of time, and for a heavy workload can be prone to connection timeouts.
As part of my role, I put through many catalogues to a site, with a combined number of products in the 1000's - and it was quickly having to scale, so there had to be a better way. I knew there were people who had desired to write posts directly to SQL, and what is a WooCommerce product? A custom post!
From there, we can expand the basic post, to all of the types involved in making WooCommerce products. There's attachments, which is the product's image, a standard product and then also variants - which are child entries to a primary:
Next, we need a method to handle the specific meta values for each type of post. Customize to suit:
You'll notice I've left room for a custom attribute ("MyCustomAttribute") - use this to add any particular tags to the product, which could also be used to filter your shop. Finally, we need a public method to pull everything together, and ultimately to return the created post ID:
And that's about it! Those of you with a keen eye may be wondering how you would handle using the correct category ID. I don't have a method to use for SQL to create, but that would be an easy task to figure out, the following query will show you how you can retrieve what is currently created:
Now you're laughing! For me, this has decreased migration to our public facing site by about 80-90%
Hope this inspires!
The main issue, which turns in to a cumbersome work-around, is that our imges are all hosted on an external CDN. As I have already covered, by using the REST API, despite you give the URL for each product's image, it still uploads it to the media library. This comes at a cost of time, and for a heavy workload can be prone to connection timeouts.
As part of my role, I put through many catalogues to a site, with a combined number of products in the 1000's - and it was quickly having to scale, so there had to be a better way. I knew there were people who had desired to write posts directly to SQL, and what is a WooCommerce product? A custom post!
Think Large, Write Small
Whatever we do - we don't want to write functions in our classes, which just specifically writes a WooCommerce product and its attributes, it has to be made to scale, because I can almost guarantee you're going to end up doing re-factors down the track. We're going to start with just creating a function which creates a simple post:From there, we can expand the basic post, to all of the types involved in making WooCommerce products. There's attachments, which is the product's image, a standard product and then also variants - which are child entries to a primary:
Next, we need a method to handle the specific meta values for each type of post. Customize to suit:
You'll notice I've left room for a custom attribute ("MyCustomAttribute") - use this to add any particular tags to the product, which could also be used to filter your shop. Finally, we need a public method to pull everything together, and ultimately to return the created post ID:
And that's about it! Those of you with a keen eye may be wondering how you would handle using the correct category ID. I don't have a method to use for SQL to create, but that would be an easy task to figure out, the following query will show you how you can retrieve what is currently created:
Now you're laughing! For me, this has decreased migration to our public facing site by about 80-90%
Missing some values?
What you may find, especially if you do one export to another, is that some products, particularly variations will drop their prices. This is just as a result of WordPress caching certain bits of information, and because we're not using API's for this, we're not triggering the same events. To give WooCommerce a bit of a clean, use the following SQL:Hope this inspires!
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