Deployment of Change to Product Dating

04/24/2024:

I'm deploying a change that relates to product dating. I made a mistake early on when I started importing products: I back-dated the product table's creation dates to not be when the record was created (which is conventional practice with databases), but instead, the Zazzle product creation date. It was a bad idea to take that shortcut, instead of adding another table column so I could store both dates. Well, I'm remedying that now.

Going forward, product imports will still grab Zazzle's create date. But I'll also retain the true SHD record creation date too. For general display purposes, I'll still be showing Zazzle's product original date. But there are some special cases that matter to all of us here. Like seeing the products you most recently imported in order of import. It gets confusing when you just imported a product you created years ago and it jumps right to the back of the product list.

I'll ask you all to let me know if you notice any odd behaviors that you think may arise from this change. This is the sort of change that often causes bugs. One unfortunate reality I'll have to face is that I have lost the actual record creation dates for all past products. So I'm probably going to just set those to some artificial start date (like 1/1/2000).

Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli