Pimcore-Icecat plugin available as open source

I am happy to announce our open source Pimcore-Icecat integration (plugin). In this way, millions of brand-approved product datasheets become directly available for resellers and other users of this a popular open source PIM platform. A Product Information Management (PIM) system helps to organize and standardizing large amounts of product data, and open source ensures that it is free to download and use. We publish our integration with Pimcore also as open source, to minimize the thresholds for users to fetch and use the data from Open Icecat directly into their system. As a result, fetching standardized data becomes easy, simple and efficient.

Installation

The Icecat plugin for Pimcore is available at Github. It is, of course, free to download. A user needs to install the downloaded plugin into their existing Pimcore installation. The Pimcore extension works with Pimcore version 10 and above. More detailed documentation and installation instructions are available at https://github.com/IcecatNV/Icecat-Integration.

Functionalities

Our extension allows importing open content from Icecat into a user’s Pimcore instance. To use this functionality the user needs to be already a registered Open Icecat user. If you don’t have a free Open Icecat account yet, register here to become an Icecat user.

How to upload?

After logging in as an Open Icecat user, a user can search for products by uploading their price or catalog file. The file should contain a list of product codes and brand names or GTINs (for example EANs). Users can choose to upload a file or provide the URL location of the file.

Restarting and features

Users can restart the process if they log off while importing. But, restarting the process kills any existing import process. In order to restart just click the restart button on the Add file tab of the plugin.

The product data is available for preview after importing. Product data is available as JSON data on Icecat, and imported products data looks similar to the JSON data in Icecat. The imported data also contains elements like image galleries, videos, 3D tours, product stories, PDFs, Reasons To Buy, dynamic specifications, and marketing descriptions. Users can also edit the data imported using the Edit feature of Pimcore.

In some cases, it might be necessary to have an FFMPEG extension or a video player supported by Pimcore to be able to edit videos. You can see the review of Pimcore from our tests here.

Key observations

Using this plugin makes it very easy to import the formatted and standardized data available in Open Icecat. Some of the features like using data hub, Image gallery PDFs, etc are not very flexible in the basic Pimcore structure. As we tried to avoid making changes to the Pimcore core code, we decided not to use data hub functionalities.

The speed of importing the products depends on the performance of the Pimcore server. Consequently, there can be extra buffering if the server is running with low resources.

Future plan for the plugin

The road map for the plugin includes both functional and performance improvements. Performance improvements will focus on reducing the buffer time and improving the speed of the application. Functional improvements will focus on features like adding an option to defer importing products to a later time. We also hope to support Full Icecat users with authentication and data flow changes.