NYCPHP Meetup

[George Webb]

LY et. al.,

	I have had to work with RTML for Yahoo! store, since
our company's business practically runs on Yahoo! stores (for
better or for worse).  I have written a bunch of PHP/cURL tools
for replicating a Yahoo! store in a local MySQL database, which
allows for much quicker and easier editing, as well as the
ability to do a lot of global changes which would be next-to-
impossible with the Y! store editors.

	(For example, on Friday we had to replace all of
our chocolate accessories with fudge, since fudge doesn't
melt in shipping during warmer months.  We did this in about
two minutes with a few MySQL queries, and then uploaded
this data back to Yahoo! in a background process.  The same
process with just the Yahoo! editor would have taken
several labor-intensive hours and would have been error-prone.)

	There is one *book* on RTML which I'm trying to get back
from a former employee who "borrowed" it.  It is rumored to be
better than any of those unofficial and incomplete online
documentations.  Hopefully I'll see it in the next few days,
so I could give you a better comment then.  Our only other
documentation was a photocopied Word (or PDF?) document which
I could find out more on tomorrow as well if you want.  It
at least got me "up the ramp" with RTML, but then it left me
there with nowhere else to go except trial, error, and a whole
bunch of unanswered questions.  (RTML is, oddly enough, *not*
supported by Yahoo!)

	There is apparently no editor for RTML other than
the annoying click-based HTML online editor.  Each element
and argument must be assembled separately, and you cannot
copy, import, or export templates into, out of, or between
Yahoo! storefronts.  There is one company, however, which I
found easily from Google, which sells a Windows-based RTML
Template Editor, which allows you to do these things, in a
somewhat less cumbersome manner.  However, its interface
with Yahoo! is the same as the human's; i.e. apparently
the software must click through all of those annoying element
edits... so uploading templates is not exactly an "atomic
operation."  Also, I believe their software is charged by
the number of templates you want to ever upload... i.e. you
have to keep "refilling" this software!

	Feel free to email me for more info on any of these
sub-topics, or to chat about any other RTML stuff.  I would be
interested in hearing your experiences with Y! stores.  Although
all of the tools I've built for Yahoo! store *are* in PHP,
(un?)-fortunately, RTML and other non-PHP-related Yahoo! topics
are probably outside the interests of this group....


Best, George.

George Webb
gw.nyphp at gwprogramming.com
(802) 985-1384