PLEASE HELP - Not your average sub-category question

[enigmarokker]

As this is my first post I'd like to say.... Hello to everyone! =)


Now perhaps this question has been asked in French or another language before, or I MAY have overlooked it in the english forums but after a few hours at a day over the course of 3 days now, I'm unable to find a solid answer to my question...and I'm hoping that whoever replies to this will not simpy say "No, it doesn't and cant work like that", either ;p


MY SITUATION:::
I have a data feed that my distributor can customize for me in almost any way into a CSV file, any column can support any type of product info....but I can only generate ONE CSV file for all of my data... This feed is updated with both NEW products EVERY DAY, price adjustments, and quantity for products as well. This means that a brand new product might be places into a brand new, never before used category/sub-category mapping... Before anyone jumps the gun, all I'll say is that I have 50,000 products on average and it ran fine with Magento so I'm hoping that Prestashop does even better...I'm moving from Magento to Prestashop for "better community support" (I hope at least) ;p ,and a better/more lightweight platform as Magento runs the same on my server whether I have 10 products or all 50,000 (6-8 second page loads X_x) and on top of that its mind numbing to modify the code...

Please dont worry about other possible issues that I may have with uploading so many products at once or every day etc...that'll be another issue I tackle IF I can even get this major problem sorted first...I can even upload my CSV file cut into smaller batches...


PROBLEM::
Since I obviously have a dynamic (changed-daily) CSV file from my distributor...sometimes new products are added into new categories and new subcategories that didn't exist before... As a one man show with no programming/administrative "dream team" working for me, I CANNOT possbly go through a separate CSV each time I upload my new product CSV and check for new categories/sub-cats from 50,000 products and make a custom CSV file to import my new categories/sub-categories with...

**I NEED to be able to import my categories AND sub-categories with using the just Product Import CSV tool, all info needs to be in this ONE CSV file. Once again, I can't manage things by having to create a 'special' category mapping CSV file...

For example, in the Product Import tool, I need to have a drop-down menu allowing me "subcat 1", "subcat2", "subcat3" columns for example, or even make it so that PresaShop interprets semi-colons under the Categories (x;y;z) column as subcategory levels instead of products assigned to multiple categories...Or maybe under the Categories (x;y;z) it makes prestashop interpret sub-category levels as subcat1/subcat2/subcat3/


Question/Help Please:::

Is is possible to get PrestaShop to perform the creation of categories AND the subcategories beneath it using just the product import tool whether by hacking or a making a new import tool? (I cant spend any big money on this, if this cant be done I'd have to change to another cart with a different import process aka all-in-one-file).

Is the Prestashop engine even capable of interpreting creating categories/sub-cats within the Product Import Tool in this manner?

Not trying to bash Prestashop as I WANT to use it... but I DONT understand why SO many other cart systems out there are able to interpret the category structure of a single product (and the product that goes within it) line by line and Prestashop doesn't want to do it this way....regardless of any inefficiencies...

I dont get why Prestashop doesnt have "Parent category", "subcategory1", "subcategory2", "subcategory3" available in the Product Import tool... Or even within the Product Import tool just have "Parent Category" and then "Sub-categories (x;y;z)... THAT would solve my problem, as well as perhaps many others who want to use this cart without hand modifying a large category mapping CSV file and messing with IDs....

Can someone at least please tell me if any of this is possible without a huge amount of time/work? I figure the back-end of Presta is capable of performing in this manner and its merely a simply modification to the product import section/scripts to get it to do this? I'm not trying to be stubborn or thick headed but I CANNOT create and maintain a separate category CSV file if you understand where I'm coming from...


Thanks for any and all of your time and thoughts every. I hope that I can use prestashop in this manner as I love the available modules, overall functionality, and "web 2.0" feel that it offers compared to many other carts.

Take care -

[rylersbud]

We wrote our own import functionality that works fopr categories.

[enigmarokker]

PLEASE..... PLLLLLEEEEAAASSSSEEEE share with me? I'm begging you, plus I think it could help out the community big time. Thanks for taking the time to respond and read my lengthly post as well!...

Feel free to PM me or reply to this post if your willing to share ;p

[enigmarokker]

Bump- Anybody else please? Hopefully rylersbud might be able to find time to share come of his code/thoughts on this.

[rockraven]

enigmarokker did you find a solution to this problem after all?

Or maybe a payed 3d-party module?