Thread: Soholaunch questions

My website is http://giftbaskets2love.com. I was finally able to get into the Soholaunch Diagnostics, and everything seems to be OK, except it told me to check the FTP name and password, as that was the cause of most problems. I don't know that I ever signed UP for an FTP name and password -- it won't take any combination that I try, and I can't find anywhere to create a new one. How do I find out what it is, or create a new one?

These are the problems I'm having:
Soholaunch deletes my product descriptions when I save a product listing. It also deletes my price variants

I read something about creating "alternate pages" but do I really have to create an alternate page for each product to be able to enter any description for the page browsers to view when they click "more info"?

Basketseller

Basket,

Click the help icon, go into IT diagnostics, then click the silver bars in the center as they expand when you click on them. Click all the bars and make sure NONE of them fail. 99% of the time its under the second bar where the permissions are owned by NOBODY that causes this kind of snafu.

Also, go to webmaster icon, software and make sure you have updated to the latest STABLE version of the software.

Also where exactly are you entering the ftp info? I dont recall ever having to do that? Or.. if i did its been so long ago i now have oldtimers disease.

If all of this is correct, then put in a support ticket for someone at soho to look at it and correct it. I cant tell you more without logging into your store myself to look at it, and.. I dont get paid for the trouble shooting. So ive been ordered to make the process work for the paid people..LOL

Karen

Thanks, K-Mac - I don't remember seeing any permissions owned by "nobody", but I'll look again to be sure. When I clicked on the Diagnostics icon, under that is where it said that a lot of these problems were caused by the program not having a valid login to your FTP and to go to webmaster and global settings, as I recall - and that's where it had a blank to enter my FTP name and password, which I truly don't remember ever entering - and there didn't seem to be anywhere that it would allow me to enter it for the "first time" - it just seemed to assume you already HAD a username and password.

I'll try all the stuff you suggested, and if nothing works, I'll do a support ticket.

Basketseller

OK, I found one "nobody" in that list of permissions - in the "group" column under root directory (public_html) - but I don't have a clue how to correct it!

Basketseller
http://giftbaskets2love.com

I went to Soho to put in a support ticket - the only option I could find for me to do that was to pay them $35 for ONE support ticket?? Am I wrong about that? If there was a "free" alternative, I sure couldn't find it. I found where the file permission codes are set and tried fiddling with that, but it didn't get rid of the "nobody" under "group" on my root file. I can't find anywhere that lets me define the levels of access for user, group and world.

Basketseller

Basketseller

JoAnn --

As a VodaHost client that installed Soholaunch via Fantastico Deluxe that was licensed to VodaHost (rather than purchase Soho from the Official website directly, your VH account includes Soho as a premium, correct?), for any particular instance of customer support that requires an official Support Ticket, that Support Ticket needs be created within and serviced by VodaHost, your official "Provider" of services.

If you prefer, you can in fact opt to seek support from Soholaunch directly, but you will need to pay the fees for such service.

It is rather difficult for me to understand what type of issue you might encounter that could not be resolved independently after availing yourself of the exhaustive and readily available resources: the Official Soholaunch Support Forum, the detailed Tutorials, the Soholaunch User Manual, or the Soholaunch Support Forum here in VodaTalk.


Did you try doing a keyword issue "Search" in any of the Forums to find the solution (which has most likely been answered multiple times)?
Did you review the tutorials to spot a detail you might have missed or possibly even mis-interpreted?
The User's Manual is quite detailed and covers every aspect of Soho development.....

Hopefully you can see your issue clearer now that you've been able to step away from it for a few minutes, and with the explanation above and the links I mentioned, are better able to find the solution you need independently!

The only reason I went direct to the Soholaunch site was that I opened a Support Ticket with Vodahost asking about two options PayPal gave for integrating PayPal Webpayment Pro into a website--PayPal said to ask my provider to find out which option I should use if I didn't know--and the answer I got back was to do a support ticket with Soho - and a link to the Soho website. So I was trying to use the resident support, after looking thru Soholaunch owner's manual, Soholaunch video tutorials, etc. etc. and finding zero help on the subject.

As to the thread I opened here, I am really frustrated as I've entered 300+ products into this Soholaunch-built website, only to discover that it apparently discarded my product descriptions and alternate pricing entries for every product. Since I work full-time, I'm putting in a lot of hours on top of my regular work day to build my sites, and I put in a LOT of hours entering all this product info, as the .csv file I uploaded apparently didn't transfer anything except the product names, pix and (in most cases) the prices.

I read all the wonderful features that Soholaunch supposedly has, and about half of them don't work in "my" version (and yes, I have the latest and greatest version installed, according to what it says in the "diagnostic" screen.) This is apart from the way it discards data willy-nilly when I save a product listing!

So I'm glad to have a link to the "official" Soho forum, because until now, I had no idea there was such a thing or how to reach it. And I simply can't afford to pay Soho $35 every time I have a question, so if there is no actual helpdesk type support for Soholaunch (which given the way Voda's help desk responded with a link to the $35 per hit Soho website, there doesn't seem to be) I guess I'll just have to depend on the forums and muddle through on my own the best I can. But until I get this product data-eating problem resolved, I'm dead in the water and cannot do anymore work on my site, much less get it up and published.

Thanks for your help, though. I do appreciate your taking the time to send me an answer.

And actually, I scanned the ENTIRE Soholaunch user manual looking for an answer to either the FTP login issue or the "permission" issue and neither of them is mentioned at all in the usermanual. That whole part of the process about "if it doesn't work, how do you fix it?" isn't addressed at all in the user manual OR the video tutorials. I scanned through a bunch of entires in the Soholaunch section of this forum, and didn't find anything to answer this. Admittedly, I didn't look at all gillion entries, but I looked at quite a few . . .

Basketseller

Unfortunately, I empahtize with you completely.
I too, put in over 75 hours a week running multiple businesses, and I trade sleep, nutrition, peace of mind, and *hopes for a long life* struggling to make measurable progress developing my online interests.....despite many "peers" who vainly (literally) offer "assistance."

I ventured forth into eCommerce first with Soholaunch, and it was only after I created a customized tremplate did I discover the limitations of sub-categories and the constraints attributed to loading product: this one particular area seems to be the shared bottleneck in all carts. I have "evolved" to OSC, but only reluctantly, and to this day am struggling to wrap my brain around how to efficiently and accurately load (and sustain) more than 80,000 items per cart. There is a utility that promises to streamline the process reliably, but again, I have become all the more skeptical, as the trial version is not enabled to the point of a real proving exercise. The OSC product happens to be called "Product Manager" and if you google it, you will find at least 3 versions.

The best suggestion I can offer is to try and touch base with Ben Duncan at Template Zapper .... he is by far the best of a very select few real Soholaunch specialists, and his gregarious nature and good heartedness makes me think he would be more than helpful (if not eager to personally assist) in loading your products and answering a couple of technical questions..... (super affordable also, if he actually charges)
The PayPal gateway issue is trivial (yet technical), and only requires a precise inbound link to return to your cart directly after populating/processing on their site.

I have been so distracted from resuming my own Soho debacle that I have not yet made the move myself, but what I suggest to you is exactly my intention as well.

Let me know if I was right? (That Ben is in fact the Secret Soho Solution)

Originally Posted by Basketseller

OK, I found one "nobody" in that list of permissions - in the "group" column under root directory (public_html) - but I don't have a clue how to correct it!

Basketseller
http://giftbaskets2love.com

On the top there it has a fix my permissions, and if that doesnt do it, put in a support ticket and ask them to do it. This will solve your issues most likely even with the ftp. The reason its asking you this, is to have permission to make changes, and you arent NOBODY, so it has to be set to your master user name on control panel to update the store and the databases.

As to your payment methods, paypal standard is already configured into soho, but not payments pro. If you qualify for payments pro, why are you not using a merchant account? You can set one up thru vodahost for free, with montly fees of course, but in the long run its cheaper than paypal payments pro, even on transaction fees, and generally can be used on more than ONE website. That will forego your payment integration issue as well. If you have trouble with setting up a merchant account you may also contact me personally.

Karen

I'd be more than happy to use the Vodahost merchant account - I looked all through the options that were listed, and didn't see any free ones--they all wanted pretty hefty set-up fees, which I can't afford, as I'm already out the $999 I paid SOL for ECI and didn't use and couldn't get money back for, plus $179 for YourPay which I ended up using on SOL--while having yet to make a sale on my SOL site and being unable to get this one up and running where it might, possibly make a dime or two to help with all these mounting expenses, which are about to bury me!

I have to pay a monthly fee with PayPal Pro too, so the monthly fee I can live with--it was the up-front set-up fee I was trying to avoid, as I simply don't have it.

Where do I find this free merchant account? I knew it said something about a free merchant account when I signed up, but I never could find that option when I was looking for one.

On the other issues, the "fix my permissions" won't work because of the FTP log-in issue I mentioned. I went to control panel and opened the "FTP Manager" and tried the username it lists and the password - neither of them worked. So I set a new one. That didn't work either. So I don't know what "FTP username and password" the Soholaunch Webmaster/Global settings page is looking for, but it sure ain't any that I've been able to find! And without it, the "Fix permissions" just pops up a window that talks about how they have to know my correct FTP username and password before they can do anything.

I sent Vodahost a support ticket about both these issues, so if they can fix the "nobody" issue, maybe that will fix the rest of the "permission" issues so that Soholaunch will stop eating my product descriptions and price variations.

Basketseller

Vasili,

I'm glad you said that about the product loading thing is the bottle-neck in all shopping carts, because I thought it was just me and I was either (a) too dense to use the thing correctly or (b) cursed for all time by the vengeful computer gods. I've used two or three now, and encountered that problem in every one of them! I tried going back and re-working my .csv file to make sure that wasn't why it wasn't loading the info, very carefully matching up fields to make sure that wasn't the problem--and still ended up typing most of the **** in by hand because either it simply refused to load half the .csv file, or it loaded it, but wouldn't read the info or put it in the product record. And ALL of them seem to be fond of mysteriously devouring data when you're not looking. I once had one that wiped out all my prices for no apparent reason. They were there when I was working on my product list one night, and the next day I went back to start loading products into pages and -- voila -- all the price fields were blank! You'd think somebody could do better! If I knew how to program it, I'd write one myself!

Basketseller

I uploaded a csv file with 2500 + products with no problem. You just have to set a few fields like DISPLAY for one and a couple of others, Id have to look to tell you, but I did it and had a store running totally in less than four hours. If youd like.. I'll look. One key factor in the csv for soho is the the pri_key, which is just a list of the products starting at one, to how many ever you have. you can FILL this with a few clicks if you are adept in excel. The other critical one is category numbers, which you get from the store builder, unless you want them all to go to one category in the cart area. Might take a couple of hours to do this one, but once you get that done, the products load up, price, picture, categoy, visible to the public etc. Most of this is laid out somewhere, in the wiki maybe but its extremely doable and again.. one of the EASIEST uploads ive ever done for storebuilding.

All carts have their quirks, and you must simply take the time to work them out. You wont believe HOW MUCH soho has improved since ive been using it, and some of it at my suggestion too!

Put in a support ticket for info on Vodas Merchant account.

I also can get you free setup and if you read the other forums announcements youd find it there.

Karen

Update: I was finally able to get the magic combination of username and password for the FTP manager to work - and then Soholaunch's Diagnostic ran its "repair permissions", but the ownership on that root file stayed "nobody", and the stuff that wasn't working in my shopping cart still isn't working. So I'm waiting for the Voda people to get back to me on the support ticket I opened. Seems to be taking them a long time! They asked for a whole bunch of info--my control panel username and login, and numerous other things, haven't heard back since I sent them that.

Basketseller

Please be patient. Vodahost doesnt service this, but the owners etc at soholaunch do. Unfortunately, they dont work weekends, because they arent running a server, just software. If you dont hear by tuesday.. then jingle on your support ticket again.

I KNOW extremely frustrating, but, its not Voda software.

Karen

I did get an answer from Voda - they finally did fix the ownership on that file - I went through diagnostics again and everything "seemed" to be fine . However, when I went back to Soholaunch, it still won't save my price variants or product descriptions. And, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention before, when my prices have .99 on the end, it drops the .99 when they're saved! What's up with that? Is there a setting somewhere for the number of characters that is causing that? I thought all the SQL fields were set at 255 chars. by default.

So it turned out the permissions didn't make any difference to solving the-problem. I guess Soholaunch just hates me, and isn't going to save all those product descriptions I've been entering by hand, no matter what I do! I was soooo hoping this was going to fix the problem. Now I don't know what to do. I'm pretty much dead in the water for getting this website up and looking at MORE hours of work to re-enter all the **** it ate up. So yes, I could be described as frustrated, right now! But thanks for all your help.

I'll rummage around and try to find info on the Vodahost merchant account--not that it will matter, I guess, if I can't get the products into the website. I was hoping to get this site up and running in time for the Christmas shopping season. It's beginning to look like more and more remote of a possibility at this point.

I even considered s****ping the whole thing and trying to rebuild in Osscommerce or whatever it was, but I took a look at it, and it looked way to html-ey and technical for my limited skills! Though I have learned some basic HTML and can usually manage to tweak to get what I want with a little trial and error if I have template code to work with.

Again, thanks for your time and help. I know you forum folks aren't getting paid to do this, and I appreciate your time and efforts on my behalf.

Basketseller

Basket..

If you contact me via the omf forum, privately and give me your store login details i will go look at it for you and see if i can find what it is that you are doing or what is going wrong.

You do see there are two description boxes yes? short teaser and a long one? Make sure you are doing the detailed html description in the long one.

Anyway.. you know how to contact me if you want me to look at it.

Karen

Karen,

I sent an email to the OMF address I had in my address book, and the only reply I got was one from Michael Truett about it being caught in his spam filter. Did you get that email? I'd had answers from you before that came from that address, so I thought that was the one you meant?

Basketseller

Iwayu at the Soho forum is going to take a look also and see if he can figure out what's going on. One of the Soho forum guys told me there have been a lot of problems with the price variant thing since the last update and gave me a suggestion to try.

Here's what he said, in case it might help somebody else . . .

AH.. Another varient problem. Bask...try arranging that product in the varient form another way. Soho messed up the variant screen all together since the new upgrade(subcat work differently now). Delete the product and redo it with changing the sub cat and varient.....Now sometimes i have to list item number with the varient..where before the item number was in the sub cat... hope this helps.

Nope I didnt get it! LOL.. thats a general dump mail box and i dont check it regularly, and hes the owner. I meant for you to login to the forum and either email me from the forum or pm me!

Just send it to kmacenterprise at aol.com Take out the spaces and use the @ symbol of course.

Well if theres an error in the script, that would explain your headaches and they will need to fix it like asap.. which means they should be putting in a patch for it. Just in case, if you like.. ill try to remember my login info to the bug reporting section where we report this stuff straight to the programmers attention.. but it wont be probably til friday.. im booked up til then and.. brain dead too.

Karen

Okies Basket JO!

You have mail and I explained the variant function to you in detail and I had no issues getting it to save whatsoever. I wont go into details here, but just letting you know you have mail to the account that you sent me.

Karen