As described in How's that Ubercart review coming along?, my work on a Drupal ecommerce site using Ubercart came to a halt when Node Import refused to import my spreadsheet. I found and fixed the problem: Node Import was choking on a column that held paths for my nodes' images. (It was choking silently and demurely, which didn't help at all; a spittle-flinging "ack.. hack... image paths... hurk... killing me..." would have made my troubleshooting a lot faster.)
It seems Node Import wanted slashes in front of my paths (like this: /images/picture.jpg), whereas the book example I'm following shows paths without (like this: images/picture.jpg). I'll add more on that in the final review, but let me note that I can't say for sure it's an error in the book; perhaps the slash-less paths are correct under some setups, such as a different file system setting. (My sample site is using the Public, not Private, download method. Not that I know that that matters.)
In any case, for anyone having trouble getting Node Import to work, one basic troubleshooting step should be obvious: try importing versions of the spreadsheet with columns removed, one batch after another, until you can track down the column(s) with data responsible for the trouble. (You know, remove half the columns, so you test the remaining half; then reverse things so you test the other half... If one of those two variants causes trouble, then test that with first one half of its columns removed, then the other half... There's a name for this sort of thing, but I'm blanking on it. Computer-y people, anybody know?)
All right, back to the Ubercarting...
In the same boat
Hi there, I am undergoing exactly the same journey as yourself in setting up a Drupal e-commerce site from the packt book.
I came across the same problem with node_import but unlike yourself I gave up and started adding product individually, maybe if I had stuck at it I would have solved it like you. I might now go back and see if I can get it to work.
I have got the basics working on a local server but with a few error messages cropping up am now bravely venturing into the realm of patching to fix a problem I have when users search the site, wish me luck!
btw I'm a drupal newbie using MAMP to run it locally on my mac.
Same boat, other way
Oddly, I'm in the same boat but going the other way (if that makes sense) in one respect: While I was having all the troubles with Node Import and other aspects of getting Ubercart to work, random "Page not found" or other errors from my hosting service were just adding to the frustration. So I thought working locally would at least stop some annoyances, and speed up the troubleshooting...
But I last used MAMP a couple years back (and then only for all-new sites, not sites brought over from elsewhere). When I tried moving my in-progress site from the hosting service over to the local machine and MAMP, I ran into all sorts of new problems...
I have no doubt that I'd fix those perfectly after getting re-acquainted with MAMP setup, but for now, I said "forget it" and stuck with the sometimes-balky hosted site. That's fine; if something, somewhere wasn't choking up hairballs, it just wouldn't be Drupal development (at least for me... : )
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