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Showing posts from 2009

Adding custom Yahoo Store fields - Catalog Manager vs. Store Editor

In a non-legacy Yahoo Store, there are two ways to add custom fields: through Catalog Manager under "Manage my Tables" and through the Store Editor, under "Types" (the Store Editor's "Types" are essentially the same as Catalog Manager's "Tables".) Whether you add custom fields from Catalog Manager or from the Store Editor does make a difference as each has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Catalog Manager To me the main advantages of using Catalog Manager to add custom fields are: 1) You can add multiple fields quicker 2) You can later change the field's name and even type 3) You can delete the field if you no longer need it. 4) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are included in the data.csv file if you download your catalog. 5) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are also included in the catalog.xml datafeed file, which is used by the comparison shopping engines, for example. (See the Search

Once again ONCE

Back in September of 2007 I wrote a post here about using the ONCE RTML operator to speed up the yahoo store editor . In that article I mentioned that the ONCE operator has two modes, one to evaluate the operator's body once per publish and the other, once per page. What I said there was that while ONCE :publish has great potentials and practical uses, ONCE :page wasn't too useful. Well, today I must correct that statement, as I recently discovered two ways to use ONCE :page. To recap, a statement like this: TEXT ONCE :page GRAB CALL :some-template will evaluate the body of the ONCE operator once on the page and output its result. So in the example above, it would only call the template called some-template once on each page and output whatever some-template writes to the page. So far so good, if you have this block only once on the page, then having ONCE :page in it makes no difference. Now consider this: some Yahoo! Stores have a breadcrumbs trail both at the top and at t

What is product-url anyway?

I keep having to field questions about the product-url field, and since it came up yesterday, I figured I'd try to clear up all the confusion about it. So the name product-url suggests that whatever you type in there will become the URL of that product. Unfortunately, this is not the case, or rather, not in the intuitive way. The URL you enter there will be used as the URL for that product in Yahoo Shopping, on the built-in search results page, and on the shopping cart page, however, the URL you type in there DOES NOT actually change the physical URL of the page. What is the URL of a page in a Yahoo Store? In any Yahoo Store built in the store editor, the URL of a page is the store's domain name and the page ID + .html. For example, in my store at www.ytimes.info, I have a page whose id is rtml101, thehrefore, the URL of that page is http://www.ytimes.info/rtml101.html . Why would you want to change the URL? For SEO reasons, it is believed to be better to have a URL tha