Buyers of ECI can download the latest version from their account.

Scale System

The scale system goes from 0 to 9 and a letter for each number, A to I. Adding a number value to the variable indicates we want all levels of output before that number to be displayed. If we use a letter, it will only output the data for that letter. This is a very quick way to display a lot of data then shorten it to something specific. Sometimes I want specific values to be displayed for many days as part of long term testing and this approach allows me to increase or decrease the output while always viewing values that are a higher priority.

0 or A

Critical Information: Zero is the default value, showing a limited amount of information, no major dumps of $_POST data and long lists. However the most critical values stored by the plugin will be displayed as a way of constantly checking the plugins state or a projects state depending on the type of plugin being used.

5 or E

$_POST dump: setting it to the value of one will include the output from 0 and also extend the output with a var_dump of $_POST i.e. var_dump($_POST). In some cases this can be a lot of information so I’ve made it number 5 so we can make use of various other levels of output without having to display $_POST every time a form is submitted.

 9 or I

Package and Version Check: the last one is really meant for myself to double check all values have been updated properly when creating new versions.

Missing Numbers and Letters

Some numbers and letters on the scale are simply not in use yet. This approach is new but I’m finding it very useful. I can display information from all actions during testing by changing a single value in the main file rather than adding things like var_dump($_POST) to applicable files.

* = see terms & conditions

A new WordPress CSV Importer plugin is coming for 2012 and it promises to be something very different from any other plugin not just those for importing data. Months of work and research has gone into the plugin with release aimed for April 2012. Before you read the details, let me be clear that the new plugin does not require a monthly subscription for it to continue operating once installed. There is an optional subscription that extends your service, suitable for long term users with a larger budget. I will cater for those on a small budget so please do not be put off.

Purchase Price

All packages come with unlimited free upgrades, no charges are made or subscription required to upgrade the plugin. No subscription is required to continue using the plugin once it is installed either, plus the licenses come with very long unlimited use periods suitable for most users even developers.

Pre-Order available until 1st March 2012…

• Pro Pre-order £99.99 (2 years unlimited use and premium support included*)
• Gold Pre-Order £49.99 (1 year unlimited use and premium support included*)
• Silver Pre-Order £14.99 (2 month unlimited use and premium support included*)

Domain Credits & Subscription

Subscription is not required, the plugin will not at anytime stop operating however there is a system in place to avoid my 2 year previous “Unlimited Use” policy from being used. This new plugin also uses a lot more of my server resources so there is a slight increase in fees.

A free subscription period comes with every package, during which you can activate the plugin on as many domains as you want, terms & conditions do apply to the “Unlimited Domain Activation” feature. Domain Credits exist for those who do not want a lengthy subscription but instead want to use the plugin on a specific number of blogs. Some packages will give Domain Credits for using when the subscription period ends.

Free Subscription Period

• Pro gives 2 year subscription meaning 2 years unlimited domain activation
• Gold gives 1 year subscription meaning 1 unlimited domain activation
• Silver gives 3 month subscription meaning 3 months unlimited domain activation

Each package comes with free domain credits for using after the subscription expires…

• Pro gives you 20 domain credits
• Gold gives you 5 domain credits
• Silver gives you 1 domain credits

Domain Credit Refunds

Domain Credits can cost as little as £1.99. These are considered micro transactions which I try to avoid administration for. In most cases no refunds will be granted especially if you have already used the plugin on domains in the past. Purchasing  more Domain Credits is indication that you have used the plugin on other domains. Anyone found to purchase Domain Credits, use them then do a charge-back will be responded to seriously. It is fraud and I usually find a way for Paypal to agree with me on things like this. Please take care with your Paypal account and the decisions you make. If a dispute arises I always settle in good time. If you choose to take funds back by force without discussing the matter and giving me a chance to consider your situation you are at risk of effecting your existing blogs.

This information is being written to support WebTechGlobal Beta testers who are testing Web related software, mostly WordPress plugins; not desktop software. The advice and knowledge used may not apply to all types of software or development. The information is meant for users who are very new to the concept of communicating with a developer, not exactly something everyone doeso in every day life and depending on the developer or the user the communication can breakdown fast. Debugging can be impossible at times. The users interpretation of a fault will vary, how they deal with it and report it will also vary. A developer receiving details about any faults in software may also misunderstand what the user is actually trying to communicate.

Why take the effort to send a good fault report?

Emails or tickets can be very time wasting when they do not contain enough information or misguide developers. Forum threads claiming all sorts of faults/bugs which are a result of an earlier fault are very damaging to the future of a product i.e. a single fault happens, possible something very unusual, the applications stored data is effected and then causes a chain reaction of problems. In reality there is only one fault, sometimes even user error and it is important I establish this quickly. The ideal report is very detailed, laid out in a way that is easy to read, images attached, noticed thrown out by the application pasted and maybe even a video to show the steps taking by the user. Videos are perfect but take time, also good software for it usually costs, someone please correct me if I’m wrong I’ve been using the same software for 2-3 years now.

Beta Testing Conditions

I would like to take the chance to mention the main conditions applied to Beta testers and remind you all.

1. All reports must be sent by the email address provided on the interface of the application or an email address you have received communication from regarding Beta testing.
2. Do not create forum threads regarding beta faults/bugs.
3. You can create forum threads for general beta advice i.e. where to test, how best to test something, where to get test data or files.
4. You are not permitted to upload videos for public viewing. If you can ensure the video is hidden from public, even restricted to just a friends/contacts list then this is acceptable. It is important that Beta testing videos are not mistaking for the final product or even seen once the final product is released.
5. Thank you for your co-operation, if we work together I can deliver and provide Beta testers with a discounted software. Discounts start at 50% off.

Tools

The first tool I want to promote is to encourage users to take screenshot. This is common but not common enough, sometimes users don’t even copy and paste a notice/error. Sometimes there may not be one to copy and paste. In either case a picture tells…, you get the point. Here is a browser extension I recommend and use a lot myself…

Pixlr Grabber

“Grabbing screens and pulling images from the web just got a bit easier. With the Pixlr Grabber add-on, you can copy, save, share or even edit your final grabs – including any image or background – with just a right-click.”

Select the browser you use for testing web software…

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• No other browsers currently supported
• Official site for Pixlr Grabber

If you know of any other good software that is free, easy to user and quick to install please suggest it by commenting below.

Fraps Screen Recorder

This is a screen recorder recommended to me many times. Even a 10 second video can help. 10 seconds is quickly uploaded, obviously not public.

Click here to go to the Fraps Screen Records

Advanced Contact Form

As I write this I’m also working on an advanced contact form that adapts depending on the reason for contact being made. A critical part of this form is bug reporting features. It will have form fields for specific information, you may even be reading this from the screen that has that form. I intend for the form to automatically attach a screenshot with the screenshot itself being created automatically also, all possible with PHP and Javascript but it is slightly complex. For now it is form that adapts, please use this form if it exists in the application you are testing. It will send the report to where I want it to be sent too, usually by a SOAP API, which is secure, direct and very easy for you.

A bug report button will also be put on most of my applications screens. Information regarding the screen you are on when clicking the button will be sent with the report. This will save you explaining these details. The information will be stored on the WebTechGlobal server, in a database for fault reports. The information can then be crossed referenced and I can easily detect when a single issue arises more than others. Allowing the proper priorities to be applied.

Other Features of The Contact Form

• Can select priority level, Beta testers need to indicate the most serious issues by selecting High priority.
• Can select methods. Sometimes users won’t have a choice though. When a user has a choice, they may select Email, Forum or Ticket. The ticket and forum options makes use of Web Services, SOAP API.
• Can opt to send sensitive data including FTP login, admin are login, hosting login etc.

Please request a copy if you do not want to wait for the release of 6.4.8, it is currently still in development.

Remember that updating information and actions can be found on “6. Updating” screen. This screen acts as an overview to confirm what updating has taking place in our blog and to apply manual updating actions. Data is updated first, then the plugin will detect that a record has been changed since it was used to create a post and if you have activated updating the new record will then be used to update the post.

Public Testing

Please visit http://www.importcsv.eu/nightly-builds for details on accessing the blogs used for testing. Anyone is allowed to register and use them.

I just thought I would quickly blog it while it is happening. Refresh the page every minute or so to see new posts published.

Delete Table

1. When we deleted a project table on the Finish page. The resulting message stated that the table could not be deleted, even though it had been. This has been corrected to display the correct message.
2. Project data import history will be reset when deleting the project database table. There are circumstances this will not be the desired result but for most users it will be. This change now allows users to basically start all over again with their data import. Previously the project data importer progress would be kept and so even though we deleted the table. The plugin would behave as if the recorded statistic of imported record was still a fact.

Removed Widget One

In the earlier days I planned to provide a lot of cool widgets but there has been little or no demand for them. I still feel some of my ideas for widgets will make a lot of users realise they need them. For now however the code that created Widget One for Easy CSV Importer has been removed. The new CSV importer coming in 2012 will have widget support at some point but ECI will not. If the widgets in the new importer get used then I would still like to add some to ECI so this project is not over for sure.

ECI Log Function Bug

The function that writes log entries to the .txt log file also made changes to the $pro an $csv arrays. If not used correctly this function could undo any other changes made to $pro and $csv during a form submission for example. This is a design flaw and could have been the cause of more than one issue so I’m hoping some users see a very positive change.

Duplicate Records During Import Now Counted

There is a setting to allow duplicate records to be entered too the product database table. A duplicate is where every columns value for a record matches another record, even the slightest difference in one column would mean they are not duplicates. The new counter will store a statistics in relation to failed record imports. The term failed does not mean a plugin fault but simple the opposite to an inserted record. It is a total of all such records and the new statistic indicates how many of these failures are due to a CSV file row being a duplicate to a database table record. The statistic is stored in $pro as “rowsinsertfail_duplicate”.

Disable All Automated Ability

I added a constant to the eci_i_variables.php file that has the value “on” by default, allowing automatic abilities to happen as normal. Changing on too “off” will disabled the following abilities quickly no matter what plugin settings you have saved or what each of your project configurations are…

• Automatic Data Import
• Automatic Data Update
• Automatic Post Creation
• Automatic Post Update

Automatic to Autopilot

Until now I refer to automatic events in ECI as Automatic Updating or Automatic Post Creation but you will also see me using Autopilot now.

myproductfile.csv.txt

Can you see anything wrong with this file name? I can’t, it is a perfectly valid file name and is an example of files people try to use. It is a valid file name providing the application accepts it. Easy CSV Importer does not work with .txt at this time and this is a .txt file. Also I never coded the plugin to take .csv.txt into consideration and even right now I don’t have a clue how ECI would react to a file with “.csv.csv”. I’m not going to test it either. These are the sort of things that happen but are so rare we don’t go spending a lot of time getting around them. I’ve never yet seen a file downloaded from a website that provides the file with an extension like this and that is generally what I go by.

Column Headers/Titles/Names

The first CSV importers for WordPress and in general most of the scripts for PHP required specific header names to be used. This actually a lot better for performance but generally not a good approach for a plugin that is meant to be used by hundreds who all have various different CSV files. So we sacrifice performance for flexibility by allowing any CSV file file with any column titles to be used. Whatever you called them, your CSV file’s header row/row one/ first row requires labels for each column. They can be anything you like. If you plan to update your CSV file by overwriting it with newer files then the format of the file must not change, only the number of rows the file contains can change in order for updating to work. This is because one Easy CSV Importer establishes the format of your CSV file i.e stores your column names. Then it not only expects those same column names but it expects them in the same order. This is the best way to maximize performance and something I’m trying to perfect.

My Point?

My point is, it is not really possible to predict processing time and I’ve not even mentioned the features in Easy CSV Importer that will effect how many posts you can create per second. There is also your data to consider, I’ve seen files with 5 columns and I’ve had CSV files sent to me with 36 columns. An extra 29 columns is a lot of processing, a lot of memory and if you make use of a lot of the columns in your design the loop to build a posts content is a great deal longer than the loop time for a project of 5 columns.

There are many variables to take into consideration. If you want to create 2000 posts in a blog that already has 2000 posts, it is a lot more work for WordPress than if the blog is a fresh installation. The reason being is when WordPress or ECI queries the database to check existing data the returned values are smaller. When posts exist in the blog, there is more likely to be values returned from queries and then arguments need to be processed as a result.

Seconds vs File Size

I’ve not spent a lot of time focusing on how long a specific file size takes but this is the closest and quickest approach to getting average times. If a 50 MB file takes 100 seconds then we can just say a 100 MB file will take 200 seconds, although it would probably be more like 220 seconds but that is another estimate from experience. It is still not an accurate approach. Take feature images for example. If you use feature images and import images to your WordPress library the use of that feature along adds a great deal of work to your server.

I’m not sure I have the years experience required to guess the number of microseconds each feature will add to the processing time of a single post. If someone does, there are many ECI users who would like to read about your estimates.