Royal Mail Basic UK Shipping Modules

Well spotted schoolboy, I've never had a free shipping product ever, so tis unlikely I'd have found that. I'll incorporate in the update.

The postal weight is being shown my website screens, however it doesnt appear to follow through to the order or on to the email that goes the customer

What is being shown on the order is Sub-Total: £13.00
Royal Mail Airmail (): £8.50
Total: £21.50

But screen shows Royal Mail Airmail (Delivery Weight : 1 package of 0.22 Kg's)

I find it useful for the weight to be on the order form as I work from a printed copy when packing and can check the correct weight has been entered for the product and that the postal rates are correct.

This is unlikely to be a shipping mod issue. It is probably something that is not configured in the Order Total Area. And when I say "not configured" I mean that the developers saw no reason to include it in the OT as a standard feature.

It should be possible to include the data, but I wouldn't know what files are involved.

toyseller, the shipping routines only do calculations - i.e. the main Zen Cart code calls the installed shipping modules and in effect says - 'This address, this weight; give me a price if you can.'
Any use or display of that information is done by by other code, and is nothing to do with the shipping modules. I would suspect the template display code for the checkout process, but that's a wild guess.

I think it is an issue with the Basic Mail routines because ... I had until the Royal Mail price changes been using the Big Royal Mail Airmail equivalent to calculate Airmail prices and this did display the weight on the order form.

Both add-ons mean copying up 2 files per type of postage to the same directories, this is why I think it is something that is catered for in Big Royal Mail Airmail's routine that isnt done in Basic Mail. I thought that the routines supply the wording that goes into the order form (the wording differs and that is reflected on the order form according to whichever routine I activate). I just thought that Basic Mail hadnt incorporated displaying the weight within the wording.

I had to cater for the World Zones 1 & 2 for the RM postal changes and with a knowledge of older programming languages I could see how to add an extra zone to Basic Mail, but couldnt see how to do this in Big Royal Mail as the coding isnt so easy. I feel a bit stuck between the 2 routines now. It might be better to go back to the Big Royal Mail routine as it gives wording I want, but I cant see how to create a 3rd zone.

Is there an ETA for an update to this plugin to reflect the 2012 changes?

Thanks

I'm debugging at the moment, should have a testable release candidate over the weekend.

If you require any help testing I am taking this postal change as a chance to also update to V1.5. My postal requirements vary between 75g small packet through to 20Kg+ with both UK and rest of the world destinations. As part of my own testing I will be putting a lot of varied orders through so its no problem to include your plugin as part of my own testing.

Indeed, that's the general idea, I was just getting it to the stage where it will actually install, and not kill the shop :)

It's been uploaded to the addons/plugins section here, and will presumably appear within a couple of days.

Otherwise grab at accompaniments dot co dot uk slash pub slash BasicUKMail.zip case sensitive. The server is fairly elderly and temperamental, but should be up most of them time.

Rgds,

Chuck

Hi Chuck, Thank you for your mod. It's working fine on my shop. But I have got a problem when I try to translate the language file from english to chinese. It shows random charts. "�̶��˷� �̶��˷�"

Can you help me please, I have no idear where went wrong.

Hi - I'm getting the following error:

Warning: constant() [function.constant]: Couldn't find constant MODULE_SHIPPING_PARCELFORCE48B_COMPENSATION_ in /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/domain.com/includes/modules/shipping/parcelforce48b.php on line 161

I've tried reloading the mod but to no avail. Any idea what I've done, or not done?

Thanks!

MeltDown:

Hi - I'm getting the following error:

I've tried reloading the mod but to no avail. Any idea what I've done, or not done?

Thanks!

Sorry, I see that this is addressed (somewhat) earlier in the thread.

Question concerning the unit of weight used: Because my product lines tend to be quite small and/or lite, i.e. glass beads, ribbons, etc., I am currently using grams (gr) as my unit of weight. To use this add-on the recommended unit of weight is kg.

Am I correct in assuming that I would need to update the weight of each product individually? For example: A current Shipping Weight of 4gr would need to be updated to 0.004kg, correct?

If indeed this is the case, is there a more efficient way of doing so, say a sql patch, rather than physically altering hundreds and hundreds of individual items? Or could I continue using grams but alter how the add-on uses the weight unit?

Thanks!!

Hi Meltdown, the 'constant' error is a quirk of the PHP version running on the server. I tried various fixes, but haven't yet found anything that 'fits all'. Easiest is simply not to copy the Parcelforce 48b files onto the server if you're not using them. Once installed, it goes away.

You are 'sorta' correct on the weights and such, but I think, missing a fundamental point or two. Firstly, Zen Cart doesn't care what your weight units are. They are simply 'units'. From what you say, on your store, you have settled on grams.
Equally, in setting up this module, I settled on Kgs. Rather than editing hundreds of products in your store, you should probably be looking at minor changes to the mod. (Don't raise the bridge, lower the river...)
You could add a factor in the code in the shipping methods you're using to divide your 'incoming weights' by 1000 to get kg. 'on the fly', but I'd suggest editing the price strings for the methods you use to be in grams, and change the units in the /languages/english/modules/shipping folder for those methods, to also show 'grams' in the shipping estimator and checkout.

Hopefully that explanation is not too convoluted.

If ALL your weights are currently expressed in GRAMS, and the DIGITS used are whole numbers, then you can run a SQL PATCH that will DIVIDE all your product weight values by 1000.

When you have done this, you will need to edit your english.php LANGUAGE FILE to change the LABEL for your weight unit from g to kg.

SQL patch:

UPDATE products SET products_weight = (products_weight / 1000);

You can run this through your ADMIN >>> TOOLS >>> INSTALL SQL PATCHES

fairestcape:

If ALL your weights are currently expressed in GRAMS, and the DIGITS used are whole numbers, then you can run a SQL PATCH that will DIVIDE all your product weight values by 1000.

When you have done this, you will need to edit your english.php LANGUAGE FILE to change the LABEL for your weight unit from g to kg.

SQL patch:

UPDATE products SET products_weight = (products_weight / 1000);

You can run this through your ADMIN >>> TOOLS >>> INSTALL SQL PATCHES
Beautiful piece of work! The patch performed perfectly. Thanks to you both!!

Just a quick Heads-up that there is a release candidate of the 2012 pricing available in the Plugins/Downloads section. Please report any funnies/errors you spot while using it.

Changes include all known (by me) changes to pricing and methods for 2012 including -

Standard Parcels insurance above the basic insurance (46 quid) removed.
New airmail zone added for airmail & Int Signed for. Country lists may be incomplete.

VAT sprinkled all over the place, where possible. There are some really nasty changes, where a service is free of VAT unless additional insurance is required, at which point the WHOLE cost attracts VAT.
The experimental Parcelforce 48B module has been considerably enhanced and updated.
International insurance is noted as 'may be 250 or 500, depending on destination'. No other details available. Parcelforce have similar caveats on some countries.

Im still trying to get anything other than "Royal Mail Airmail (): £8.50" to appear on my order form or customer email for the Airmail module
ie. nothing appearing between the brackets ... although the bracket wording is appearing correctly on the screen

But have since posting my problem I have copied up the Airsure and International Signed modules for this add-on and these are both passing the weight through to the order form

ie. Royal Mail Airsure (Delivery Weight : 1 package of 0.1089 Kg's): £3.90
and Royal Mail International Signed For (Delivery Weight : 1 package of 0.1089 Kg's): £9.05

toyseller, if the others are displaying correctly, it means that there is nothing strange about you template setup, so other than a mis-copy of the files to the server, of file corruption, the only thing that can affect that is if 'Display Weight' is set to False for the module.
Essentially the code is identical in the modules, so there's not much that can cause it that wouldn't affect all the modules.

Check if that is the case in Admin-Modules-Shipping for the Airmail module. If so, Edit, and set it to True.

Regards,
Chuck

Enable RM Airmail = True
Tax Class = --none--
Sort Order = 8 ... nothing else set to 8 within shipping
Minimum weight to ship = 0
Maximum weight to ship = 2
Split shipments on maximum weight to ship = False
Minimum value to ship = 0
Maximum value to ship = 150
Split shipments on maximum value to ship = False
Display delivery weight = True
Display Insurance = False
Display delivery time = False

These are the values Im using. Also, I have another website with different template behaving in exactly the same way.

Is there something I can put in the code to display the values of the fields ? Im not a php programmer, so not sure what to use or where to find any debugging displays.

Also, wondering if any of the values that are set elsewhere in Admin are causing a problem.

Its strange that the wording is appearing on screen but not in order or email ... as would expect all 3 places to either work or not work.