Question

On our Magento 1.5.0.1 I wrote a PHP script to update all of our product meta titles to be based on the name and SKU of each product. The script is run by calling PHP via SSH.

After running the script I noticed in our M2E Pro (the eBay syncing module) that every single product appears to have become disabled.

Looking at the actual products they aren’t disabled, so it appears my script is somehow faking the event.

Out of our 3,000+ products, though, one of them was disabled and subsequently M2E Pro removed the listing from eBay.

Here is my script:

<?php
set_time_limit(0);
define('MAGENTO', "/home/discount/public_html");
require_once MAGENTO . '/app/Mage.php';
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');
umask(0);
Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID);
$storeId = Mage::app()->getStore('default')->getId();

$products = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
    ->getCollection()
    ->addAttributeToSelect('sku')
    ->addAttributeToSelect('name')
    ->addAttributeToSelect('meta_title');

$total = count($products);
$count = 1;

foreach ($products as $product)
{
    $mt = sprintf("%s [%s]", $product->getName(), $product->getSku());
    $sku = $product->getSku();
    if ($product->getMetaTitle() != $mt)
    {
        $percent = $count / $total;
        echo $sku." ".$percent."\n";
        $product->setMetaTitle($mt);
        $product->save();
    }
}
?>

I’d like to know what I need to do to my script to make it correctly update the meta title without causing odd events?

Answer 1

Stab in the dark here, but it’s a good chance the M2E extension has an event listener setup for model/product saves, and in that event listener does things depending on product state.

By itself this isn’t a problem, but when you load an EAV model via its collection it loads the bare minimum of attributes. Since you haven’t explicitly loaded product status via addAttributeToSelect this may be confusing the M2E extension. Trying adding the status attribute. If that doesn’t work try addAttributeToSelect('*') — M2E may be checking other attributes as well to decide when to pull things.

Finally, when you load an EAV model via a collection their afterLoad isn’t called. It’s possible the M2E extension (naively) assumes something that happens in afterLoad will have happened, so you may want to call it explicitly for each product.

$product->afterLoad();

Short of that, you’ll need to reverse engineer M2E to the point in the code where it’s doing it’s above logging and determine why it thinks it needs to disable a product. Since this is a commercial extension, I’d reach out to the developers. If you pay for something you deserve some level of support.