Order Management Progress

Order Management is a feature I have wanted to improve for about three and a half years now. I made some major adjustments to the order logging processes in June and July. However, I am happy to report that I have done more in a day towards the overhaul of the order management in version 5.0.0 than I did in a whole month last summer. In addition, all the items I've been working on will be included in the general distributions. I figure this is key feature that I will not withhold for members only. I might make more advanced versions available next year for "members only", if it's found feasible to do, but the idear is to make the cart useful as possible and provide some of the other extras to members only in order to increase donations and memberships (such as additional gateway files and higher maintenance files such as UPS and FedEx shipping in real-time).

I've coded out the backbone for order logs to be written out to individual orders in 3 pieces: cart contents, order details, and old style order logs but for individual orders. I've also added a feature to grab most of the key data from the a gateway order lib file during the processing of an order and place that data into a hash array that can be used in the log_order routines.

Using the above hash array, I've also added the capability to create master order logs in any of the following groups (individually or in any combination): year, by month(within year sold), and an overview log that shows recent orders when logging into the online store manager areas. This will allow reports to be generated by year, month or any range of dates, which are dynamically available according to the dates of orders available within the cart.

I've also kept the old order log style. I have enhanced it for easier downloading and splitting into separate orders for legacy programs that might be looking still use the existing order log schema.

I've also added a product

I still have a lot to do on this aspect of the managers. I need to write the manager routines to look at the data available, and then the routine to generate the reports. It's going to be very flexible. This new format will also make it easier to code out the QuickBooks accounting format exporter, or even to a tab delimited file for a spread sheet... the possibilities are endless with this new format. (I will look at other accounting formats much later)

I took the stance of what I'd like to see in the sales and order data reported and balanced it with resources and time I have to develop these features. It will definately be an ongoing improvement process as my programming eyes are much bigger than the time i have to devote to the desired features. So, I "tone" it down with the intentions of adding in the needed pieces gradually as time permits. I already have ideas on improvements on the new features for later versions. But, in the end, this is yet another massive advancement for the AgoraCart shopping cart project.

Until next time,

Mister Ed

 

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