Ceon Back In Stock Notifications 3.0.0

[conor]

Hi,

It gives me great pleasure to release a new version of Ceon Back In Stock Notifications!

This is an essential upgrade as it features several bugfixes.


About the module

The Back In Stock Notifications is an essential module, which lets customers subscribe to a notification list for a product that has gone out of stock.

The subscription process is completely automated. Customers don't have to have an account to subscribe themselves, but if they do, the subscription is automatically associated with their account.

Once a product is back in stock, an e-mail can be sent to all those subscribed to the notification list for that product, using the convenient admin utility.

You can read a list of the features here.



What's changed in version 3.0.0

From the Revision History for the software...

[ADDED] The names of the products now link directly to the product's page in the Back In Stock Notification subscriptions section of the customer account area.

[ADDED] Added an option to have the product's model appended to its name in the Back In Stock Notifications section of the customer's account area. Just uncomment the HTML in the template part and/or adjust the template part as desired.

[ADDED] A column listing the category has been added to the products with subscriptions listing in the admin utility. Thanks for the code goes to Tony Niemann .

[ADDED] A column listing the category has been added to the subscriptions listing in the admin utility.

[ADDED] Added an option to view all the products/subscriptions in the listings in the admin utility, instead of having to browse by page. Thanks for the code goes to Tony Niemann.

[ADDED] Spanish translation added for admin and catalog files. Thanks for the translation goes to torvista, Ana Bobes!

[UPDATED] The products/subscriptions listings in the admin utility can now be sorted by column, by clicking on the column headings. Based on code by Tony Niemann.

[UPDATED] The links to the products in the notification e-mails now open the link in a new window.

[UPDATED] The unsubscription form in My Account didn't work if the submit button had no name, as this meant that the expected submission signal variable wasn't being passed in the form. A hidden variable is now always passed to avoid the possibility of this occurring.

[UPDATED] The code to build the links on product listing pages to and out of stock product's subscription form has been updated to remove the sorting parameters found on the listings pages. This should hopefully result in better compatibility with SEO software that builds the links incorrectly.

[UPDATED] The number of subscriptions per page displayed in the admin utility now uses the value of the Zen Cart admin ‘Maximum Display of Products on Reports” setting instead of the store-side “Search Results Per Page” setting. Thanks for the suggestion goes to Tony Niemann.

[UPDATED] The styling of the tables in the admin utility improved to make the listings clearer.

[BUGFIX] The check on the product listings pages, to determine if a logged-in customer was already subscribed to the Back In Stock Notification list for a product, didn't work because of a code logic error. (Thanks to ArtO on the forum for the heads up).

[BUGFIX] The code to load in the text version of any Back In Stock Notifications e-mails was only ever loading in the standard language's e-mail template. Now each language the store uses can have its own specific e-mail template. If a text e-mail template doesn't exist for a language, the standard language's e-mail template will be used instead.

[BUGFIX] Fixed a problem with the submission of the notification utility form redirecting the user to the admin login page. The admin notification utility's form wasn't passing the session ID, which could cause problems on certain server/store configurations (specifically those that didn't save the session ID in a cookie, as happens with some that run PHP as a CGI).

[BUGFIX] The greeting in the subscription e-mails is no longer hard-coded. Instead, a new language define has been added to the language file(s).

[BUGFIX] The text preceding a link in the text version of notification e-mails is no longer hard-coded. Instead, a new language define has been added to the admin language file(s).

[BUGFIX] The function to build a link to a product's admin page (by RubikIntegration team) didn't work properly, breaking whenever quotes or other special characters were in a product's name.

[ADDED] Sample modified core file and sample modified template files for Zen Cart 1.3.9h added.

[UPDATED] Documentation updated with instructions on how to create a version of the e-mail templates for every language the store uses. This is an essential part of the installation process for the module, other languages can't send HTML versions of the e-mails without it!

[UPDATED] Documentation updated so that the dynamic functionality works when the documentation is being accessed from a local disk using Google Chrome.


It has been submitted to the Zen Cart downloads area and should be available there soon.

Upgrading shouldn't take too long, comprehensive instructions are included in the documentation.

Enjoy!

All the best...

Conor
ceon

[jgreene]

Hi conor,

As we near sending out our first notification I started looking at customizing the notify email...

I may have been very dense today, but it look me ages to finally find out where the words/text of the notify email ("Please check it out before it goes out of stock again!", etc.) are defined- and they weren't anywhere I expected them to be, given the location of the subscribe and unsubscribe email text defines! I definitely didn't expect to find them in admin...
The defines are here:
admin/includes/languages/english/functions/back_in_stock_notifications.php

I wonder if this could be added to the documentation under configuration? Or maybe it is obvious to everyone else...

I also modified code to add a closing line (I called $EMAIL_CLOSING) to the end of the email, since we wanted something to say "PLEASE NOTE: This is a one-time notification. If a product goes out of stock, you will need to sign up again to be notified when it returns." A bit of a bother, but it will hopefully help the customers...

Also, it seems like perhaps $EMAIL_DISCLAIMER (already defined) at the end of the email should be standard at the end of the distribution email template for html and txt? It isn't there now on the standard distribution template, and I only knew to add it because I was looking at the code...

Also, if I may request - an option to turn off the "powered by zen cart" portion of the $EMAIL_DISCLAIMER would be helpful I think. (Yes, I just commented it out in the code).

And FYI, I added an . "\n" to add a line break after each product listing in the html email on about line 132 of
admin/includes/includes/functions/back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php
to make a cleaner email and avoid the super-long line it was producing.

I can send you what I did if it is of any help... Although I would guess my mods are pretty obvious...

Thank you- your module has been a life-saver, and I have convinced our store-client, who is super-happy, to make a donation!

[conor]

Hi,

it look me ages to finally find out where the words/text of the notify email ("Please check it out before it goes out of stock again!", etc.) are defined- and they weren't anywhere I expected them to be, given the location of the subscribe and unsubscribe email text defines! I definitely didn't expect to find them in admin...

Yes, sorry, this isn't so obvious I'd guess, but it is the standard for Zen Cart to keep the e-mail templates in the store's side, even for admin e-mails.

I've never read the Zen Cart manual before but I'm guessing that it must not mention that then.

I wonder if this could be added to the documentation under configuration? Or maybe it is obvious to everyone else...

No, thinking about it, I don't think it would be that obvious, it's certainly not intuitive. If I ever create a new version of the software, I'll add this info to the docs.

Also, it seems like perhaps $EMAIL_DISCLAIMER (already defined) at the end of the email should be standard at the end of the distribution email template for html and txt? It isn't there now on the standard distribution template, and I only knew to add it because I was looking at the code...

All of the standard Zen Cart e-mail variables are available for use.

I didn't include the standard Zen Cart disclaimer in the default template to save people the bother of taking it out as I find most people do so when modifying the Zen Cart e-mail templates.

The standard Zen Cart disclaimer text is pretty poor IMO...

Also, if I may request - an option to turn off the "powered by zen cart" portion of the $EMAIL_DISCLAIMER would be helpful I think. (Yes, I just commented it out in the code).

..as you've noticed. :)

As it's the ZC standard I'm afraid I'll not be changing it.

And FYI, I added an . "\n" to add a line break after each product listing in the html email on about line 132 of
admin/includes/includes/functions/back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php
to make a cleaner email and avoid the super-long line it was producing.

That's not a "cleaner" e-mail but I know what you mean... I'd meant to put a newline there but forgot. I've now made the change in the "trunk" for the module.. so it's there if a new version gets released.

I can send you what I did if it is of any help... Although I would guess my mods are pretty obvious...

Thanks for your feedback!

Thank you- your module has been a life-saver, and I have convinced our store-client, who is super-happy, to make a donation!

I'm glad you like it. I hope the store does well.

All the best...

Conor
ceon

[Davx]

Hi

At the moment this module is sending plain-txt emails for non account holders and html for users that are logged in.

Is there a way I can change this so everyone gets the html emails?

Kind Regards

Dave

[conor]

Hi Dave,

At the moment this module is sending plain-txt emails for non account holders and html for users that are logged in.

Is there a way I can change this so everyone gets the html emails?

You'll have to manually recode Zen Cart's e-mail function. It is that which decides what format to send the e-mail in.

Should be easy enough to change by modifying the core file.

All the best...

Conor
ceon

[Davx]

Cheers Conor

...for anyone else looking you need to edit /includes/functions/functions_email.php.

      // handling admin/"extra"/copy emails:
      if (ADMIN_EXTRA_EMAIL_FORMAT == 'TEXT' && substr($module,-6)=='_extra') {
        $email_html='';  // just blank out the html portion if admin has selected text-only      
}

//Add this after the above around line 160
            if ($customers_email_format != 'HTML' && $email_html != '' && ($module == 'back_in_stock_notification_subscribe' || $module == 'back_in_stock_notification_subscribe')) {
        $customers_email_format = 'HTML';
      } 

[Tonyy]

Hi

Installed BISN and the request to subscribe form appears thereunder in the product page and you can subscribe all OK and you get your email confirming, so communications with database seems OK on that page.

However when you go to admin under Catalog - back in stock notifications - and you click on it you encounter an error

1146 Table 893_shop.shop_back_in_stock_notification_subscriptions' doesn't exist...

the database table exist and subscriptions are there.

I noticed that database name in our mysql is Shop_back_in_stock_notification_subscriptions with a capital S.


any suggestions?

Thank you
Tony

[conor]

Hi Tony,

I noticed that database name in our mysql is Shop_back_in_stock_notification_subscriptions with a capital S.

Make sure your table prefix is the same in both your store and admin configure.php files.

Other than that, I'm not sure but this is something you've done wrong and not a problem with the software.

Hope that helps.

All the best...

Conor
ceon

[Tonyy]

Conor

I was able to pull the page up by removing line #100 of back_in_stock_notifications.php in admin.

$products_query_raw = strtolower(str_replace("\n", ' ', $products_query_raw));

The page and notifications seem to be working fine,.

I have not explored more if there would be any other implications as a result of removing this line.

Please update if suspect any.

Thanks and happy 4th.


Tony

[conor]

Hi,

I was able to pull the page up by removing line #100 of back_in_stock_notifications.php in admin.

$products_query_raw = strtolower(str_replace("\n", ' ', $products_query_raw));

Okay, I see what happened there then. You're clearly the first person to use the software with a database that uses capital letters (that is actually very rare).

Sorry, I suppose that's technically a bug. I'll remove the strtolower() from the next version.

The reason things didn't break after you made this change is that the str_replace("\n", ' ', bit was added by the Zen Cart developers to the splitPageResults class in the latest versions of Zen Cart. In earlier versions, removing that part of the line would have broken the page altogether.

You should make the same change on line 181 by the way!

Enjoy your holiday day! :)

All the best...

Conor
ceon