New Products and Date Available

Greetings:

There seems to be a bug in the coding for Zencart, when you add a new product to the store and set the Date Available: to be "3/3/07" for example. If it was added in Feb, it comes up as a new product for Feb.

What i would like to do is set it so that if the product's Date Available is "3/3/07" it shows up as a new product for March, and not the date it was added.

This is not a bug. Zen Cart is doing exactly what it is intended to do. The new products feature lists products which are "new in the catalog". If you add a product in February then this approach will show it as new in February even if you don't yet have it in stock.

What you want is a "new in stock facility". Unsurprisingly the easiest route would be for you to reprogram the existing new products facilities to operate that way. It wouldn't be a huge piece of work, but it wouldn't be trivial either. I'd start by looking at the includes/modules/pages/products_new/header.php file and the includes/modules/sideboxes/whats_new.php files.

I was thinking, it seems that it runs off when products are added to the database, couldnt we just change that so it runs of products_avab instead.

You certainly could, that's why I don't think that it would be a huge piece of work. But there's some devil in the details ...

There is always a data added value, but there is only an available from date if you explicitly put one in - so some extra processing may be needed to deal with their potential absence or to force them in. I suspect that other wrinkles may make themselves known when you start digging into the code. That's why I wouldn't rate it as trivial either.