How this plugin works

Hi @soylaostia,

Thanks for reaching out. Happy to help you with this!

To start, I want to let you know that the answers to the following questions are a bit different from version 1.x to version 2.x which will be released widely any day. I would recommend starting with version 2.0, which you can download from www.ads-software.com here.

Since you have a few different questions here, let me take a look at them one-at-a-time ??

1. Will I be able to schedule the synchronization between my web and my Facebook page?
When you first install the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin, your products will be synced automatically. After that, you can force a re-sync from within the plugin settings and individual products will automatically be synced when edited and saved.

2. Can I define the number of products to be synchronized?
For each product, you can choose whether to include the product in your Facebook sync or not.

3. How is the behavior between this plugin and other plugins that synchronize too (like my clothe provider plugin)?
I’m not sure exactly what the “clothe provider” plugin is syncing, but the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin should work just fine in conjunction. I will note here, however, that not all product fields are synced with Facebook as only certain ones will be used by your Facebook shop.

4. Does this plugin use crone jobs? Can be disabled?
Version 1.x did use cron to generate a “feed file” for Facebook to update products, but version 2.0 uses the Facebook Graph API and does not rely on cron.

Would you please let me know if this is helpful and if there’s anything else I can help with?

Thanks,
Marcus

1. All products will be synced, non-stop? Is it ok with shared hostings?

2. So I may have to un-sync some products if I need to?

3. Clothes provider plugin synchronize pictures and info from their servers and products are saved on my website. Will Fb plugin start right away, so there’ll be two plugins synchronizing at the same time? What about images smush plugins?

Thank you for your support, this plugin seems to be a great thing, but we should be able to control the number of products to be synced, like by batches.

Thank you for your answers. ??

Hi @soylaostia,

Thank you for checking back in here with these questions.

1. After the initial sync, your products will only be synced when changes are made to the product. In our 1.11.4 release (the one before 2.0), we generated a feed file of all your products every 15 minutes for Facebook to use to update the shop. Updating products as they are updated is a much more performant method.

2. You can certainly choose which products to exclude from Facebook – either in bulk from the products admin listing or on any individual product in the Facebook settings tab.

3. The Facebook sync shouldn’t interfere with the clothes provider plugin. I would note, however, that the sync there won’t necessarily trigger the Facebook sync for a product – it just depends on how the clothes are being synced. Images will be fine, as the plugin only passes the product image URL to Facebook, not the actual image.

Are there any other questions I can answer for you? Please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,
Marcus

I gave it a try and it works perfectly. Just a little overload on my hosting for a moment (around 1000 products).

FB store looks very nice. I hope I can classify the products by categories, or maybe the plugin brings the categories from my website.

Thank you, and keep the great work.

??

Hi @soylaostia,

Thank you for the reply and for keeping us updated. Happy to hear that it is working well for you!

We are aware of the server load issue for stores with a high number of products. We are tracking this issue and working on finding ways to make the sync more efficient. Be on the lookout for frequent updates here!

The Facebook for WooCommerce plugin does not currently sync categories from WooCommerce. We will likely be adding this feature in future updates as well.

Would you please let me know if this is helpful and if there’s anything else I can help with?

Thanks,
Marcus

Hi,

You said this: “In our 1.11.4 release (the one before 2.0), we generated a feed file of all your products every 15 minutes for Facebook to use to update the shop. Updating products as they are updated is a much more performant method.”

I can see there is a lot of failed scheduled tasks, via cron jobs, every 15 minutes.

Hook: wc_facebook_regenerate_feed

Yes, I have the last plugin release.

Hi @soylaostia,

Thanks for following up here. You are absolutely correct that we are still generating this feed file every 15 minutes. While the feed is no longer a necessity with 2.0 as it uses Facebook’s GraphAPI for syncing your product information, it is likely that – if you upgraded from 1.11.x – that your Facebook catalog is still requesting the latest feed file. In this case, we did not want to let it grab an outdated feed file.

To clean this up (which we’re looking to automate in an upcoming release), you’ll want to remove the feed replacement schedule in your Facebook catalog data sources. This will stop Facebook from requesting the feed hourly.

Once that’s done, you can safely remove the feed file from your site and disable the feed file generation. I can provide a code snippet for you for this if you’re interested. Note: it is important that these occur in this order to keep your catalog accurate!

Would you please let me know how you’d like to proceed?

Thanks,
Marcus

Hi,

Ok, I did the first part. Can you provide the code snippet?

Thank you.

Hi @soylaostia,

Thank you for confirming this for me. It looks like I might need to reach out to one of our support engineers to get a snippet that will disable the feed generation entirely.

In the meantime, I have this snippet that I can share that allows you to change the duration time between generation tasks, so you can set this to a large value to keep it from running for a while.

Note that code snippets are not officially covered under our support policy, so I won’t be able to help further modify this or implement it.

You can find the snippet here:
https://gist.github.com/3fae615408e8950ddae706a03f532db5#file-change-feed-file-generation-interval-php

Would you please let me know if you’d like me to reach out to get a snippet to disable it entirely?

Thanks,
Marcus

If this problem of FB feed generation was caused for the FB plugin, how uninstall it does not resolve it?

However my problem is the cron jobs, those wc_facebook_regenerate_feed actions are failing (every 15 min) in my hosting. Interval change won’t fix the problem.

Does the new FB plugin require the cron jobs?

If the answer is no, then you should release a new version that kills the previous feed generations.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by ai4k Web Design.

Hi @soylaostia,

Thank you for providing this additional context. It is our intent to phase these feed generations out over time. Right now, most people are upgrading from 1.11.x to this new version and have feed schedules still set up in their Facebook catalogs under the data sources area.

In an effort to keep all of them from immediately throwing hundreds of warnings that the feed can no longer be found, we’ve intentionally left this in the plugin. As more of these are removed (or never added in the first place), the feed generation will be removed as well.

In the meantime, it’s worth a try changing the feed generation time. If yours are failing, it may be due to the next one starting before the previous one could finish. A longer delay between them may help resolve this. Again, the feed file is not necessary with 2.x, so setting the interval to something like 24 hours may be enough to get it out of the way until it is removed from the plugin as well.

Would you please give this a try and let me know how it goes?

Thanks,
Marcus

Hey @soylaostia

It has been a while since we heard from you, so I’m going to mark this topic as resolved. If you’re still experiencing issues please take a look at our documentation for more information and create a new thread if you have further questions.

Thanks,
Lindsey