Hopefully the last of the issues before we properly launch!! Help appreciated!! :)

Hey everyone,

So for a long while now I've been ducking in and you lot have been extremely helpful! Over the last year or maybe a bit longer you've managed to get me through a variety of issues and problems. So many in-fact that we've almost finished and can almost properly launch our zen cart store! I say properly because we've done a soft launch and let some customers in to start trying it out and using it...

So far so good, however I have a small list of the remaining things that need to be sorted before we are happy to say it's done... I've been googling like a machine all morning and managed to clear up a few issues myself. That being said there are still some issues that I can't figure out, I'm still working on them however I thought it couldn't hurt to ask you awesome folk to see if you guys know of any solutions!!

So here, my problems with a brief explanation, if you can help / know a solution to any I'd love to hear it!! Don't think you need to be able to solve them all, I'm more than happy to get a variety of solutions from a bunch of you!! :D Also, because he's awesome I feel I should say <3 DrByte!! ^_^

Now, problems:

Thumbnails for the all products listing.
When you click "all products" on the main menu it brings up the list, however not all of the products are showing their thumbnails, only some. Then when I go into that product via the normal categories (or the admin section) the products all definitely have pictures.. Any idea why it wouldn't be displaying some?

Checkout FORCED drop-down selection.
On the last step of the checkout process there's a drop-down box for our customers.

It has 3 options:
1 - Do you need inserts?
2 - Yes, send inserts please!
3 - No, thank you.

Essentially so our customers can just easily tell us if they need inserts with their order... However I want to try and force the customer to pick either 2 or 3... Basically I want to lock 1 so that the order can't be submitted until the customer has selected 2 or 3.. That way none of our customers will forget / leave it as option 1... Any ideas?

Customer phone numbers.
Hopefully a simple one, tried googling heaps but I'm clearly searching for the wrong things... When we get orders and go to print the invoice the customers phone number is displayed in the US format not in the Australian format..

Example (current): (249) 294632
Example (what we want): (02) 4929 4632

I'm assuming it's probably just a location setting or something... But I really can't find it... >_>

Archiving orders.
With our current crappy website (not the awesome new zen cart one) once we receive an order we can "archive" it... Basically it just hides the order away so it doesn't show up as a new / current order however it doesn't delete it so that we can look it up if we ever need to. I've been trying to find a way to do this in zen cart but so far have been unsuccessful. We could just set their status to "update" or create a new status but I'm concerned that it will confuse some of our employees if they aren't hidden away well..

Alternatively, if there's a way I could set it up so that when we set an order to a certain status (eg. update) then it would clear that order from the "new orders" box on the admin homepage that'd work.. Alas I haven't been able to find a way to do that either...

Clearing the new customers box from admin panel.
Much like the order issue I'm trying to find a way that once we've given a customer access into the site I want them to be cleared from the new customers box on the admin homepage / panel thing.. I realize that both this issue and the archiving one above will probably be hard to fix given that the "new" customers / orders boxes are really just showing the latest, not new ones. However I'd still like to find a fix if I can as it'll be far easier for the less tech-smart employees here.

Well that covers the issues that I'm currently trying to work through, as per usual when I post any and all positive / helpful feedback is greatly appreciated!!! Hope you guys are having an awesome day / week!! :)

regards
Dave Brady
Craft Studio

First question re "archiving" orders and customers so they don't show in the "new" lists: how many new customers and orders do you feel you are likely to get per day when your Zen Cart is operating fully? As you currently have customers and business, this is something you should be able to estimate pretty well. If there are more than 5 or 10 new orders per day, you are probably not going to see many un-handled ones in the list, so the issue may become moot.

If you do need/want to hide handled customers and orders in admin home, I would suggest adding code to the lookup/output that gets the recent items, to fetch the customer and order status or whatever is the distinguishing factor, and for each one check whether it meets your criteria for hiding. Then you can disable the display for that one. Looking at the admin files that handle those functions should make the task clearer.

gjh42:

First question re "archiving" orders and customers so they don't show in the "new" lists: how many new customers and orders do you feel you are likely to get per day when your Zen Cart is operating fully? As you currently have customers and business, this is something you should be able to estimate pretty well. If there are more than 5 or 10 new orders per day, you are probably not going to see many un-handled ones in the list, so the issue may become moot.

If you do need/want to hide handled customers and orders in admin home, I would suggest adding code to the lookup/output that gets the recent items, to fetch the customer and order status or whatever is the distinguishing factor, and for each one check whether it meets your criteria for hiding. Then you can disable the display for that one. Looking at the admin files that handle those functions should make the task clearer.

Thanks for the info, I hadn't thought of doing it that way... I get what you're saying and I've found the chunks of code in the admin index that is relevant to the customers and the orders... The only problem is that this stuff is going over my head a little... I understand it somewhat because thankfully all the variables and such are labelled appropriately... However I'm trying to figure out how I'd get an if statement or something in there and working... I was running the pseudo code in my head and it should work...

If customer = approved;
do nothing

Else;
Display in new customers

If order status = archived;
do nothing

Else;
Display in new orders

Seems pretty straight forward but nonetheless I'm a little lost and scared to try this solo... >_>

Edit:

I'm working on implementing the if statements... However I'm having some troubles figuring out what the variables are called for the order status and customer approval status... Trying to find them in a variety of places but nowhere seems to call the variables... Or at least nowhere calls the variables as far as I can see.. :( lol

On the admin home screen in the lower left corner are statistics with clickable links to certain order statuses. Click on one of those statuses to view only the orders in that status.

The OP wants to make it easy for non-tech-savvy staff by hiding customers and orders that have already been handled, in the newest customers and newest orders lists on the admin homepage. The status lookups work great, but it's a matter of not confusing the lower-level staff at first glance.

You will probably need to add to the SQL queries to the database to fetch the statuses along with the customer/order names; this information will not be available via variable until you do that. Look at some other data-fetching pages for hints on how to handle this, like the ez-pages sidebox. EZ-Pages Footer Columns in Plugins modifies the kind of code you will need to be handling, so you could look at the files in that for guidance. (Compare those files to their stock counterparts to see the additions for fetching new data.)

For what it's worth, in v1.6.0 (not yet released), you'll be able to drop in your own admin home page widgets, and turn off the ones you don't want.

In the meantime, ya, you'll have to change the /admin/index.php code.

Okay, firstly thank you to DrByte and gjh42 for the advice / help...

DrByte:
I hadn't even realized that there was that little orders box in the bottom left... That could actually just work as is... I should just be able to tell them that they only need to do something if there's orders in "pending"... Although I really should try and get the system I mentioned initially running...

gjh42:
I have very little experience with manually or directly entering things into a SQL database so while it sounds solid I'm concerned about attempting it myself... Also I'm a little confused, I assumed because the status of orders is displayed around the place that it'd be doing it via variables... Well maybe not variables as such but for example if you go Customers > Orders you get a list of your orders... each order has it's status displayed in the table... Wouldn't it need to have variables or something that can be called in other code to display this? >_> - I could very well be out of practice and not know about new fancy things... Could also be a massive noob... :P

All the information is stored in fields in the database tables. Any particular bit of information is only available for use if it is looked up in the database during page creation (when the viewer clicks on a new page) and copied into a variable. Once it is in a variable, it can be used and tweaked until that page vanishes when the next one is built.

gjh42:

All the information is stored in fields in the database tables. Any particular bit of information is only available for use if it is looked up in the database during page creation (when the viewer clicks on a new page) and copied into a variable. Once it is in a variable, it can be used and tweaked until that page vanishes when the next one is built.

Oh, right, that makes a lot of sense.. Thanks for explaining! :)

Hey guys,

Just bumping the thread and seeing if anyone is able to help with the other issues that are yet to be resolved? :)

regards,
Dave