Hi Zenners,

I'm fairly new the Art of ZenCart and am amazed at the claims towards the number of Companies supposedly use ZenCart. I've done a bit of my own playing and am a bit of a code monkey myself and admire the amount of work and subsequent quality that such an undertaking has produce. With such briliance and foresight that has obviously gone into this fine product, I'm amazed that there is no means to select a batch of orders by its shipping method and export the relevent information to any Batch label generation system (to my knowledge at present).

With the number of ZenCart shopping cart supposedly in production, I have to ask the questions, "Do these people actually ship product and if so do they really do it by copy and pasting from the order info?", and, "Do they manually update the status of each order?"

I am aware that there is a module for exporting shipments to USPS.com and read a thread that made reference to some one mapping the UPS world ship imort directly to their ZenCart Database but niether of these seem like a solution for a company that ships more then 10 - 20 packages a day.

The next thing I decided to do was look into modifing ZenCart to handle such an export. Personally I'd like to see a USP worldship export module, an Endicia Dazzle Export Module, Direct DHL label generation, and a Generic CSV order export Module, and import modules for each that will record tracking to the oder and mark it as shipped. The major problem I encountered is that the section of the database that stores the shipping method information for a shipment is a field containing the ship weight, Method, and carrier concatonated into one line of text.

I like to think of my self as a fairly competent code writer but in order for me to make the necessary database changes I would have to understand how Zen Modules work together (as far as what is requiered within the module document to make it Part of ZenCart as to make a module that will work for all, with the least amount of customization by the end user) and what documents govern the information that enters that info into Orders:Shipping_Method. Given that information I can write the rest.

I was hoping that I could get a nudge in the right direction from the Zen Comunity as not to re-invent the wheel so to speek and thank you for the wonderful contibution to open source that is Zen Cart!