Two questions, hopefully you have two answers! :)

[quickening]

Right,

I have one cart where the person is coming from a static website into a Zencart install. She has around 500 email addresses that she used to pay someone to send newsletters for her, but now she would like these email accounts imported into the cart so that she can send the newsletters and such her self.

Now, all she has is email addresses, not physical addresses/shipping/billing/etc, nor their real names which obviously throws a bit of a spanner into the works.

I thought that perhaps we could import the 500 email addresses into Zencart then send out a newsletter telling the users that there is a new site in place and to please sign in using the "forgot password" feature to gain access to their account then to fill out their address books accordingly.

My problem now is, how do I import the email addresses into the database so that an account is created for each one and that the things like the address book and account histories are linked properly? Can this be done or is it a pipe dream?


Right, my other question is this. Another cart I look after, the guy wants to have the same design, same customers, same categories, same everything but different products.

I've had a go at truncating tables and I've managed to either completely break the cart by taking out the wrong tables or not going far enough where the products are out of the cart, but the admin panel tells me there are 400 or so products that are partially deleted but I don't know how to clean them out.

Basically, could some one please tell me what tables I'd need to empty (or what query to run) so that all aspects of the cart are maintained with the exception of products/attributes/order history are deleted?


Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

[frank18]

hi quickening,

to your question 1:

with due respect, this sounds to me like an attempt to provide a spamming facility - and that is not in the true spirit of zencart and its community. you may want to rethink the proposed project.

to your question 2;

the MultiSite module (see download section) may be the answer for your customer - please see there.

frank

www.frnt.org

www.zencart.frnt.org

[quickening]

It isn't a spamming facility... As I said, she simply went from a static site to Zencart. Zencart has a email newsletter facility so she wants to add her contacts from the static site into Zencart then with her "new site launch" newsletter, she wants to add something to the effect of "to log into your new account, simply request a password" that way all of here already optin clients will have an account and she'll have 1 central place for their information rather than relying on 3 different 'companies' as she did before.

As to the multisite, that would work if he wanted one central hub. Basically, it is going to be a 2nd company with completely different accounting. He just wants to keep the design/categories.

Thanks tho

[quickening]

Thought I'd give this one more bump then go to bed in hopes that the time difference will make a difference and someone might see this! :)

Thanks and g'night!

[stevesh]

You're asking a tough question. You could enter the email addresses into the Zencart database easily enough with Easy Populate, but that won't create an account for each. I suppose you could use Easy Populate to create accounts by entering all the customer info into the spreadsheet to create the .csv file, but it might be just as easy (time-consuming) to enter everything directly into Zencart.

There's a Add Customers From Admin mod in Downloads.


For the second question, how many products are we talking about? I don't like to mess with the database directly unless I have to, so, in that situation, I'd just clone the Zencart installation, and then copy the existing database to the new site, and delete categories and products from Admin.