add date available to product listing

Dear zenners,

first of all srry for my english, i'm dutch so trying to explain my problem as good as i can.

I'm trying to find a sullotion te get a better display in my product listing, since my products can be ordered before the release date of a product.
in my eyes this could be solved in a couple of ways:

1.) making the buttons different (so instead of a "buy now" button u would get a "order now" button when a product date isn't available yet)
2.) adding an extra line or collumn with the date in it when a product will be available.
3.) a combination of both of the above

unfortunally i'm not able to fix it myself, i've been trying it for about 3 months now but keep getting errors and ending up deleted the code that i already had and replaced it with origional.

i hope u understand what i mean and have a sollution for this,
many thx in advantage

Easy solution - stop editing code and use the admin panel :smile:

1. Go to admin -->catalog -->categories/products and locate the product(s) you want to set an available date for.

There is a box there for you to list a date the product will be available. Right above it, click "in stock" even though it is not in yet.

In your product description, be sure to use some text to explain to customers when it will be shipped so there will be no confusion.

2. Once you've done this for all products that you want to apply this to, go to admin -->configuration -->stock and set it to allow check out.

3. Now you need to make sure your display settings will show this information on the store pages.

Do this by going to admin -->configuration -->index listing and set it to show upcoming products on main page.

I hope this helps you :smile:

already have those things ;) but don't want to edit every products discription when it became available.
zen-cart has the ability to store the available date so it shouldn't be hard to get it listed aswell.
i know there's an option that it shows the date added.. which i removed tho, but if it could display date available there would be fine aswell.

u can see my site at https://www.consolesunited.nl perhaps that makes a bit more clear what i want and what i already have ;)

Hi there,

To make it display a button that says "order now" instead of "buy now", create a different button and upload it to your ZC image folder. Make sure the file name is the same as the current button image file. This will replace all "buy now" buttons with "order now" buttons.

To display a "buy now" button on available products and an "order now" button on upcoming products is not possible without extremely significant hacking of some core files. It's just semantics anyway - in both cases, they are ordering and paying immediately. The only difference is when the product will ship - which is made clear by the product available date.

The product available date will show up automatically at the bottom of the product description, just below the buttons for "review this product" if you have that enabled.

The message showing the product available date will automatically go away once this date has passed. You won't need to manually update it once the product becomes available.

I realize you don't want to have to go back and edit all your products that this would apply to, but that's the only way to make this show in the product listing as an automated function. Even if you hacked the code to display this elsewhere in the product listing (like in another column as you said you'd like to), you'd still have to go back and enter the date available.

If you're concerned about the line of text with the product available date being too easy to miss (which is why I assume you want to place it in it's own column), you could always edit the language file to make the text stand out in a bright color and bold font.

On the other hand, if you still want to place it in a column in the listing, instead of leaving the text where it is, you'll need to add another column to the table in the file where this information is displayed.

You'll need to have an understanding of html tables and html and php syntax in order to do that. You can learn a great deal about this by following the code that is already present in the file.