Autoresponder+ for ZC v1.3.x [support thread]

jabtac:

Thanks again for your great mods and your helping us all out.

No problem! Thanks for replying with your fix.

Hi Steven!

Thank you for this mod. I’m using it since approx. a year now.

But since than, I just could not use it as live mode.
What I did, is using test mode emails and contacted the bailed cart customer by my own.

Now I started again to figure out, where is the problem, that I can’t use it in live mode

I’m using zen cart v1.3.7.1
And 2 languages : german/English
I updated the latest autoresponder+

The problem is:

• when I replace the includes/functions/functions_email.php
  File with the v1.3.8a version, I can’t use anymore admin-tools-email
  Error:
  Fatal error: Call to a member function read() on a non-object in /home/mydomain/public_html/shop/myadmin/mail.php on line 380

Also I noticed that a customer using german language, will see an error after signing up as new customer. Customer using English language, will just do fine.

if I use the shop/autoresponder.php, I receive nice html emails as it supposed to be.

Now without replacing the functions_email.php file, I have a shop working for customers without any errors. But I can not use the autoresponder as live mode as it will show the following error:

I use shop/autoresponder.php in my browser and get this error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/mydomain/public_html/shop/includes/functions/functions_email.php on line 391

And the sent email content shows this:
$EMAIL_MESSAGE_HTML

Is there a way to simply edit my functions_email.php from 1.3.7.1 to keep my shop working and be able to use your autoresponder file?

Thank you so much for your help ;-)

Thomas

Hi Thomas,

It's quite a difficult issue to fix, but I do have a suggestion (aside from upgrading to v1.3.8a).

I looked at a few threads related to your error messages and it seems the error message about a non-object is related to attachment support.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=109014

I found an interesting post in the Newsletter Subscribe mod's support thread.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37185&page=64

I believe the following file from v2.09a of the Newsletter Subscribe mod could fix the issue.
includes/functions/functions_email.php

If you look at the file, it has code related to attachments.

If you don't mind, can you upload it to your site and test it.

Regards,

Steven

Hi Steven!

Thank you for your suggestions. Yes you are right I know i should upgrade to 1.3.8 :yes:

I will go through your suggestions and post here if it worked or not .

I just noticed that in query - account-no-order the Restrict to location is not working

I set up 2 presets

1. restrict location from country: Germany (for English customers)
2. restrict location to country: Germany (for German customers)

if i type in my browser shop/autoresponder.php i get double emails for each customer, one in German and one in English language.

its strange, because the same setting worked really good for query - order - status (8)
Could it be that in query no order i can not set up restrict to location?

Thank you for your time :smile:
Thomas

b_funtomas:

Could it be that in query no order i can not set up restrict to location?

Yes that's right.

I realise I wrote a lot of documentation in the read_me file but somewhere in there (probably under the "Restrict Location" section) it should say that only post-order emails can be restricted by location. I can't remember exactly why there was this limitation. I'll look into it for the next version.

Steven300:

I believe the following file from v2.09a of the Newsletter Subscribe mod could fix the issue.
includes/functions/functions_email.php

Hi Steven!

I replaced the above mentioned functions_email.php

Result:
I am able to use again email to customer but your mod send out emails with the same errors as the original functions_email.php from v1.3.7

If there is no other solution, i realy have to think about upgrading to v1.3.8a :unsure: I'm just scared about my Google rankings and existing customer records/accounts in the database. But this is another topic.

Kind regards and thank you again for your time Steven

Thomas

b_funtomas:

i realy have to think about upgrading to v1.3.8a :unsure:

I think that might be best.

Your rankings and data shouldn't be affected. And in the long-term, you will need to upgrade sometime.

Good luck,

Steven

Hi, I have two questions about AutoResponder+

Let me describe how I'd like to use it, and you can tell me if it will work this way...

I use ZenCart on a site where I sell a service where people sign-up to get a toll-free number that's used to phone-in messages for family and friends for birthdays, etc. They can download the recordings into iTunes or order a CD from us.

The order form can be found here.

Today, what happens is that right after someone signs-up for the service, I copy the customer name and many of the account details to a separate Customer Relationship Management System. From that, I generate a personalized email. If the recipients gender is female, the email talks about her, she, etc. If they order a CD, I talk about how to request the CD.

So I have four questions:

1. If I wanted to have the email go out right after an order is received, can I set the cron job to happen every five minutes? I wouldn't use AutoResponder+ for anything other than sending out these Account Details emails.

2. One thing I put in the email is the client's initial password for the service. The password is actually their Zen order number run through a mathematical formula (e.g. Order number * 3 / .345, rounded to the nearest integer). Even if I had to manipulate the underlying PHP, is there some way of running the order number through an mathematical formula so I can communicate the password in the email?

3. Can I put in some conditional logic based on the order attributes? e.g. if the recipient gender is female, print "she".

4. Can I have the email only get kicked off only if the order is of a specific product_ID?

Your mod looks great!! I hope I can use it for my purposes. It would really streamline my operations and eliminate a lot of copying and pasting into the CRM system.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Well 2) and 4) are relatively easy since both the order ID and product ID are already within the mod's code.

With 2) you could write a section which performs the formula on the order ID, then code the mod so that when you type a key phrase like "[password]" in the email to be sent, it would at runtime be replaced by the actual password. In fact this is very similar to how I coded the inclusion of an autogenerated discount coupon code.

And 3) could be done in the same way (type in the key phrase "[gender]" for example) and it would be replaced by either "he" or "she" at runtime. The difference here is that the gender isn't available to you so you would need to write some (SQL) code to look at the order's attributes to access it first.

With 4) you could just wrap a simple 'if statement' around the code that sends the email and check whether a certain product ID was in the order.

I think 1) is the issue. Autoresponder+ is designed to send delayed emails. It works by identifying the difference in days between today and when the order was created and if the difference matches the configured amount of days to wait then the email is sent. So if you were to run the autoresponder every 5 minutes (and there was a match) it would keep sending the same email every 5 minutes until the difference in days no longer matches. For this reason it's designed to be run once a day every day. Having said that, anything's possible and it could be coded not to send the same email twice.

Thanks for the detailed reply!

#4 is pretty important, and although the mod doesn't have the ability to do that, I don't have any other good alternatives to send the email from within ZenCart other than heavily modifying the order confirmation email. If you decided to add that functionality, it would be highly useful to me. Otherwise, I wonder if there is some workaround where after sending out an email, I can change the order status so that after 5 more minutes it wouldn't get sent out again....

For #3, I had thought after reading the READ ME file that order attributes were available, but I see now that it says product details.

Either way, I'll start playing around with the mod. Thanks, and let me know if you'd consider doing something to allow #4.

Thanks again.

After going through the last 13 pages i didn't encounter my problem with this mod.

I installed the mod and the sql on my zen cart 1.38a in english, dutch and german language.

When installing the sql it gave me following error:

could not install configuration key " "" because it already exists.

Then it said it processed 8 statements successfully.

When i then take a look in admin-->configuration-->Autoresponder + the page is empty, no option nothing just empty, it gives the header Autoresponder and 3 columns with descriptions but nothing else.

What is it that i do wrong?

Hi,

It sounds like there might have been a clash when it came to adding some of the SQL statements. Perhaps you have another mod installed which uses similar statements.

In any case, you need to log in to phpMyAdmin to see what's happening.

1. Go to the Configuration table
2. Click Browse
3. Sort the configuration_key column by clicking its column title

Take a look at the configuration_key column. When the mod has been installed successfully, you should see a number of fields all starting with "AUTO_". For example, "AUTO_ADMIN_COPY", "AUTO_COUPON".

If they are not there, do you see any other similar fields that may clash?

If they are there, take a look at their values in the configuration_group_id column. They should all be the same, for example 31.

Now go to the configuration_group table. Sort the configuration_group_title column and look for Autoresponder+. There should be just one field relating to the mod. Is the configuration_group_id for that field the same as the value above, example 31?

Thank you for your quick response, i will try it first thing in the morning (it's 11.30 pm now here) and will get back to you.

Error in english is: Cannot insert configuration_key "" because it already exists

In SQL configuration_key column is nothing resembling "AUTO_"

In SQL configuration group there is 1 Autoresponder+

Update:

I imported the install.sql directly via phpMyAdmin, now it works.

Okay, glad to hear it's working now. After researching this a bit, you probably installed a mod which for some reason had a blank configuration_key. If you follow the steps I listed earlier to sort the configuration_key column, you should see a field (or possibly more) with a blank configuration_key column. If you happen to find such a field, I'm pretty sure it would be useless so I believe it would be safe to delete that field from the database. However it would be wise to backup the database beforehand. This should prevent any similar problems with installing other mods in the future.

Reference:
https://www.numinix.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=1962#p1923

Thank you for this great mod Steven! Exactly what I was looking for.

Just one question/request: Is it too much work to add the picture of product next to the link? That's how Amazon does it and I think it looks pretty good.

Anyways, great job!
cheers!

Hi, I'm glad you like the mod! I agree that adding product images to the emails would be a very significant improvement. So I'll look into this at some point to see how feasible it would be. My initial thoughts are that it could be a challenge to display the product images at the correct sizes so that there's a consistency in the email but also that the images are not distorted. I'll take a look though and decide whether it's attemptable.

Hi - I downloaded your mod two weeks ago, and have been experimenting with it. I think it's great!!! I have a feature request, which I would find very helpful, and I suspect others might as well....

The request would be to have an option so that after the email runs, the order status changes to a number that can be specified in the AutoResponder+ Admin panel. This would have two advantages.

1. My main purpose for using AutoResponder+ is to mail out instructions right after the order is placed (my good is more of a virtual good). I know there is a limitation of running the autoresponder.php once a day, but if the status was changed right after the email was sent, then I could set it to run once per hour (or even more often) since it wouldn't resend an email twice.

2. The second reason would be that it would be good to (from the Zen order page) see that the status relfected that (in my case) the instructions were sent out.

I'll hardcode something in my version if you don't add the functionality (I know virtually no PHP so I'll have to self-learn), but I wanted to pass the suggestion along since it might be nice to make it part of the mod.

Another thing I'll be doing manually (but you might want to consider) is for instances when the query is order, be able to specify product ID's that were ordered that would trigger the email.

Again - this is an excellent mod. Thanks for devoting so much time to it for the community?

My Store name is misspelled on my email header?

I checked it in ADMIN>CONFIGURATION>MY STORE>STORE NAME

and it's spelled correctly

It's auto pulling correctly on my sites footer- Copyright © 2009 Fintess Depot Super Store.

Is there some where else that I need to look to change the name for the e mail?

It Currently reads "Message from Fintess Depot Super Store"

Thanks-