Datafeed Studio v3.3 is now available to download.

Keep reading for more information on what’s new in this release.

Export Site Custom Fields

If you are a user of the ‘Export Site’ site type (where you can export products from your database into posts on a compatible CMS, e.g. WordPress) then you’ll be pleased to hear that you can now map product fields as custom fields on the post.

This is useful if your theme is driven by custom fields. Note that you can still use the product fields as normal inside the actual post template – nothing has changed there.

Suspend Feed Option

If you temporarily want to suspend a merchant from being imported there is now a new checkbox on the Edit Datafeed screen that allows you to do just this.

If checked all products from the merchant are removed from your database during the next full import – but the merchant still remains on your datafeed list screen so you can easily reactivate them.

Cheapest Product

For store sites, a new template variable has been added named ‘cheapest_product’ which contains information about the cheapest product from the list of matching products for the product being viewed.

This is utilised in the updated store templates to display a short sentence above the product description with a link directly to the merchant providing the cheapest price (see here for an example).

API Auto Refresh Improvements

The tool that DS provides (admin/bin/apirefresh.php) that keeps any products that have been added via network APIs in synch has been improved.

Now, if an API product fails to synch for more than 5 consecutive attempts it will be deleted from your database.

You can also now specify a maximum number of products to be synched (e.g. apirefresh.php 1000). As the tool sorts products by the date of last refresh this means you can effectively cycle through your API products doing this – and have more control in ensuring you don’t hit any API access limits for your affiliate network accounts.

Full Changelog

The full changelog is shown below :

- added support for mapping custom fields to Export Site (e.g. so you can export products to WordPress themes that are driven by custom fields)
- added option to suspend a datafeed (i.e. leave it in the list but not imported)
- fixed bug where filter type of created filter was not set as the default when viewed again
- added cheapest product information to display product template (stores)
- improved performance of auto addition of API products
- if a synchronisation refresh for an API product fails for more than 5 consecutive attempts the product is now deleted
- fixed bug on store sites with the URL of main product picture if a custom URL had been set 
- added support for searching by (auto) category/subcategory
- added Amazon US and Custom to merchants listed in search screen
- fixed bug that prevented auto addition and successful refresh of Amazon US products
- in addition to the UK and US Amazon APIs you can now configure another country in the 'Amazon Custom API' tab
- added optional parameter to background apifresh.php script to limit the number of API products updated each run
- prevented searches at the store/price comparison site front-ends that consist of fewer characters than the configured minimum word length
- removed redundant menu options from Client site type
- made DISPLAY_PRICE variable available to use in export templates
- removed image references in admin site tabs CSS to prevent problems in IE
- now reports Curl error message if feed download fails
- fixed bug where Lite license would count API feeds towards the allowed amount
- updated wording for 'Sites' to be 'Sites or Clients' throughout the system
- fixed bug where free license only allowed 1 site instead of 2
- updated help with respect to multiple sites

Upgrading

As usual see the README.txt file for details on upgrading an existing installation.

Only three SQL statements added to the database patch file for this release, but as one of them adds a new column to your products table note that this statement could take longer than usual if you have a large database.

Link to download.