Ceon Back In Stock Notifications 3.0.0

Hi Erin,

ecclescake:

I see "Warning: an error occurred, please refresh the page and try again." This usually seems to crop up on a database error, but there's nothing in my myDEBUG cache.

The debug cache is indeed the first place I'd look. It does sound like the sort of problem that is caused by a file being corrupt or missing. I'd reupload all the files again, and also check that the value for DIR_FS_CATALOG is correct in your configure.php file.

Hope that helps!

All the best...

Conor
ceon

Hi Conor, and thanks so much for your quick response!

So I triple-checked all the files, re-downloaded the mod and copied the new version of all the files across, to no avail. This was all on my local machine, so I figured I'd try uploading and installing on my dev store and see what happened. Same error message when I tried to access the link from the notification-subscribe email, only now there was also a message in the debug cache. Turns out that subscription_code, name, and email_address were created with the latin_swedish_ci collation and the rest of my DB is in latin_general_ci! I changed the collation of those columns and tried subscribing to another product. Works great!

However! The dev store isn't sending content in the subscription notification emails. In the HTML email I just get $EMAIL_HTML_MESSAGE, and the text-only email is completely blank. My local install sends these messages fine, and the dev store sends other emails fine. I'm a little fuzzy on the email system--is the email being constructed in admin/functions/back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php? Any debugging tips?

Thanks again,
erin.

Hi,

ecclescake:

Hi Conor, and thanks so much for your quick response!

No problem.

ecclescake:

Turns out that subscription_code, name, and email_address were created with the latin_swedish_ci collation and the rest of my DB is in latin_general_ci! I changed the collation of those columns and tried subscribing to another product. Works great!

I'm glad you've got that sorted now.. it's strange that your local environment doesn't create the debug files.. obviously they are very handy so I'd do what I could to have it work "as well as" the development server, make problems like this easier to identify in the future.

ecclescake:

However! The dev store isn't sending content in the subscription notification emails. In the HTML email I just get $EMAIL_HTML_MESSAGE, and the text-only email is completely blank. My local install sends these messages fine, and the dev store sends other emails fine. I'm a little fuzzy on the email system--is the email being constructed in admin/functions/back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php? Any debugging tips?

The e-mail is actually constructed in includes/modules/pages/back_in_stock_notification_subscribe/header_php.php

It would appear you do indeed have a problem with your e-mail system.. $EMAIL_HTML_MESSAGE is built by Zen Cart with the content sent to it by the zen_mail() function used within sendBackInStockNotificationSubscriptionEmail(). Trace your e-mail function (zen_mail()) and see why it isn't taking the input given to it and building the e-mail properly!

Hope that helps!

All the best..

Conor
ceon

Thanks for the tips, Conor. Here's what I found:

The output of sendBackInStockNotificationSubscriptionEmail() seems to be correct: it's an array like the following:

[EMAIL_TEXT_HEADER] => Order Confirmation
    [EMAIL_TEXT_FROM] =>  from 
    [INTRO_STORE_NAME] => Store Name
    [GREETING] => Dear
    [CUSTOMER_NAME] => My Name
    [INTRO1] => You have successfully subscribed to the Back In Stock Notification List for:
    [PRODUCT_NAME] => Product A
    [INTRO2] => We shall send you an e-mail when it is back in stock!
    [URL_INTRO] => If you did not request to be subscribed to this list or have simply changed your mind and don't want to be informed when this product is back in stock, please log into your Account and unsubscribe yourself:
    [URL_TEXT] => Go to My Account
    [URL_VALUE] => [url]https://www.shopurl.com/index.php?main_page=account_back_in_stock_notifications[/url]
    [EXTRA_INFO] =>

That same array ends up inside zen_mail(). Anytime I log the value of $ErrorInfo within the zen_mail() function, it's an empty string. When I log $email_text or $text just before line 148 of functions_email() (just before //eof: body of the email cleanup) I just get an empty string. My functions_email() is identical to the stock 1.5 file.

Also, when I look in the email_archive table in my DB, I see $EMAIL_MESSAGE_HTML in place of the body of the email. It looks like the mod is outputting correctly, zen_mail() is taking the array and not generating an error string, yet the email that is archived and arrives in my inbox is incorrect.

I will send you more details privately and hopefully we can get this sorted!

Conor, I've sent you a donation as a token of thanks for your great mods and helpful support. (I know you know that already, but I hope to encourage others to do the same--the Ceon mods and support really are top-notch! They are more than worth a few bucks!)

erin.

Very useful mod, Conor.

Just installed it on a (heavily modified) 1.3.9h store and it works a treat.

Donation is on its way - I encourage all fellow zenners who are using this mod to make a donation to the author.

Thanks again / Frank

Hi Frank,

frank18:

Very useful mod, Conor.

Just installed it on a (heavily modified) 1.3.9h store and it works a treat.

Donation is on its way - I encourage all fellow zenners who are using this mod to make a donation to the author.

Thanks again / Frank

Thanks so much for that, it's so good of you to have done that!

I'm really glad you like the module and that it is useful to your store.. I hope it increases your sales dramatically, you certainly deserve it! :)

Hopefully I can get an even nicer new version released for you soon and it can help your store further again. ;)

All the best...

Conor
ceon

Hi Kjetil,

kjetilhansen:

I would like to install this, but it said in the plugin thread that it changes the buy now, with notify when back in stock. On my page people can still buy products that is out of stock, and they will be first in line when the items are back in stock. Is there an option that there is just the box beneath the product description that customers can be mailed when they are back in stock, and other can still buy things that is not in stock?

It adds a form to subscribe as well as a link to this form underneath the Buy Now button.

You can have the Buy Now button continue to work but it is a case of one or the other in terms of what customers do.. they can subscribe to the list or buy but not both at the same time. If they want to both subscribe and buy then they need to go to the product page twice.

Best way to see if this is fine for you (which I think it would be) is to just install the software and try it out, it doesn't take long.

All the best..

Conor
ceon

Thank you. Will do, great work btw :)

On the admin side on the list of Products with Subscriptions, is it possible to add a column showing the model number? This would definitely help when I'm reordering products. I am using Zen 1.5. Thanks.

Hi,

KathyG:

On the admin side on the list of Products with Subscriptions, is it possible to add a column showing the model number? This would definitely help when I'm reordering products. I am using Zen 1.5. Thanks.

Yes, it certainly is possible. Just update the SQL in admin/back_in_stock_notifications.php to load the products' model data and modify the output code to add in a new column/cells/header cell for product model.

All the best..

Conor
ceon

Conor has kindly been working with me behind the scenes to sort out my issues, described upthread. It looks like it was an issue of not uploading the email templates. I have a local version of the site on my computer which automatically synchs with the live version. The email templates were present in my local install, so I'd assumed they were in the live version too, but they weren't. Now I just have to sort out why they weren't being synched--it's not an issue with the mod at all.

Thanks again, Conor, for your helpful mods and kind support!

erin.

If this has been asked before, kindly point me to the thread.

I've been using this module religiously on our old 1.3.9h installation. Works great!

Recently, we upgraded our entire site to 1.5.1, and I reinstalled this CEON Module with the latest version. It appears to have picked up all of my previous subscriptions because I see a lot of entries waiting to be emailed with our new stock.

However, when I send out the emails, I am getting blank product descriptions. It's just saying this:

Dear E C Erwin,

We have restocked a product you asked to be notified about.

Please check it out before it goes out of stock again!
Product Back In Stock

As you can see, no product is listed! Any idea what could be wrong?

Just to touch on my post above, this graphic may help. When I go to perform a TEST send of the notifications, you can see that many emails are coming up with no products associated with it. That is why the emails are not giving them links to anything, but how come they are still showing up on the list?

Is this something that has to do with upgrading from 1.3.9 to 1.5.1 in zencart? Do I need to purge these blank listings from the database?

[Attachment no longer available]

Also, if I look up one of these records in the database, this is what I see:

[Attachment no longer available]

As you can see, it does contain a product id, but also no email address (even though the email is displayed on the first screenshot I posted). Any ideas?

Nevermind my post above. I think it was something modified on our side which was causing the issue.

Installed this mod on my store the other day and wow it is great! This has been the #1 requested feature by my customers and now they have it, and it has already resulted in sales coming in that would not have come in before (or so soon).

I would like to automate the checking and sending of emails now. Stocking status on many of the items on my store is set via a script (running via cron job outside of the zencart environment) that checks my supplier's database every few minutes and generates SQL to update the zencart database. So items can come in stock at 3AM even while I sleep. I would like to email the customer as soon as possible after a stock status change, and a cron job running every few minutes and invoking certain Ceon functions would do the trick.

Conor hints in the back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php that you could use a cron job to call these functions, specifically expungeOutdatedSubscriptionsFromBackInStockNotificationsDB() and sendBackInStockNotifications();. How exactly would that be done? Anyone have any clues or examples? I'm a software engineer by training so don't sugar coat it. Just trying to avoid reinventing the wheel in case anyone has already done this. I'm guessing that at least I'd need to call some sort of zencart main function to let these functions know what database they are to use, etc.

Thanks!
-Mark
President/CEO
Exile Machine LLC

Exile Machine:

Installed this mod on my store the other day and wow it is great! This has been the #1 requested feature by my customers and now they have it, and it has already resulted in sales coming in that would not have come in before (or so soon).

I would like to automate the checking and sending of emails now. Stocking status on many of the items on my store is set via a script (running via cron job outside of the zencart environment) that checks my supplier's database every few minutes and generates SQL to update the zencart database. So items can come in stock at 3AM even while I sleep. I would like to email the customer as soon as possible after a stock status change, and a cron job running every few minutes and invoking certain Ceon functions would do the trick.

Conor hints in the back_in_stock_notifications_functions.php that you could use a cron job to call these functions, specifically expungeOutdatedSubscriptionsFromBackInStockNotificationsDB() and sendBackInStockNotifications();. How exactly would that be done? Anyone have any clues or examples? I'm a software engineer by training so don't sugar coat it. Just trying to avoid reinventing the wheel in case anyone has already done this. I'm guessing that at least I'd need to call some sort of zencart main function to let these functions know what database they are to use, etc.

Thanks!
-Mark
President/CEO
Exile Machine LLC

Here you go:

http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?181440-Ceon-Back-In-Stock-Notifications-3-0-0&p=1144934#post1144934

Not sure what has changed now, but my 'back in stock notification' emails are missing my domain name in the link that gets sent out?!!?!

Any one run into this before I start digging around?

Can I change the location of the "Notify Me" button? I'd like to put it inside the FieldSet so it shows inside the form border.

Thanks for the mod, just what we needed!!!

Not sure if this was covered somewhere else and I missed it but, when I click on the button to be notified when a product will be back in stock, the link just takes me to the product page and that's it. Anyone have an idea what I might be missing here? I installed the mod as per instructions and it seems like it's working all right until i get to that. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Link to site with a product out of stock:

http://www.thecuterie.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1?xyzallow

Hello all! This is a great plugin and I have tried following the thread and have tried setting up a cron job to auto run the script but I get nothing. I am using v1.5.0 of zen cart and cannot add administrative levels or restrict them to a certain area. The latest for the admin profiles is for 1.3.9 and some of the files to edit do not exist in zen v1.5.0.

Does anyone have a solution so that I can run cron jobs and send out automatic notification of products back in stock? We have over 15,000 products and our inventory is updated every 10 minutes so it would be very nice to have this automated.

Any help would be appreciated.

Clint