Coming Soon - Ubercart module to manage distributor product data - automagically

During the last few days I have been working on a module that automates updating product information from distributors.

Most distributors update their product feeds every 4 hours. Ecommerce store owners expect product stock and prices to be accurate throughout the day, at the very least. Most ecommerce store owners have some sort of script that does some product automation, but to date I haven't seen an Ubercart module that provide this type of automation

A few features to expect: add new products, update current products, manage discontinued products, handle image gathering, receive emails on changes, backup database on cron (if adding / updating products), some manipulation to product strings, and add distributor categories as taxonomy terms.

I have about 60% left to do still. I am encouraged at how fast the first 40% has been gone; thanks to Drupal's many pre-written - file related - functions that it provides right out of the box.

The next half though will be a bit more challenging as I need to work out how products will be imported on cron. There is an ongoing thread on what is the best method to auto import content into Drupal. I am leaning on using node_import as an api to do the heavy lifting.

I will continue to update the community on the module's progress...