I am currently working on a B2B site for our company using ver 2.1.2. I need to make some changes to make it easier to work with.
View orders screen: (see attach image “Order-managment.png”)
a. Change “CUSTOMER†heading to “COMPANY†and to fill this field with company from the shipping address. I have found the heading was easy using lang.company. But how to do the sort on header and fill the fields has got me.
b. Change “EMAIL†heading to “CUST ID†and to fill the field with user_login . Header change easy but this type created a new lang variable lang.cust_id, But don’t usnderstand the sorting and have not been able to find the right variable for the field. I have tried several either I get nothing or just get the user_id from cs-cart.
Dashboard screen: (see attach image “Dashboard-changes.png”)
a. In the “Latest orders†box. Add “from (Company from the shipping address)†between “Customer name†and “for $ amountâ€
Order detail screen: (see attach image “Order-detail-changes.png”)
a. In the “order summary †line. Add “from (Company from the shipping address)†between “Customer name†and “on (date, time)â€
b. In Billing and Shipping address boxes. Remove word “Company:†and move company name above Customer name. Make this bold, remove bold from customer name. ( this address change should be done to all areas that have the customer address listed. Including picking sheets, invoices)
This one has given me a headache. If found the details.tpl pulls in info from another that creates the “company: company name” is there not a variable / field that I can grab this from the order?
I understand your concerns as we also constantly struggle with the non-standard way that the “Company Name” is handled in CS-Cart.
I believe this is mostly due to the fact that the Company Name field is handled as if it is a secondary, or non predominant field whereas it really should be the very first line of both the billing & shipping address fields and displayed uniformly in all views and email forms.
ACME Lumber Company
John Doe
123 Main Street
Seattle, WA 98765
Basically the Company Name is somewhat handled as an after thought in CS-Cart whereas for a B2B type business, it is equally as important as the individuals name, and in many ways takes precedence!
After browsing through cs-cart site I see there is a great new feature to ver 2.1.3 multi box shipping. This happens to be of great intrest to me for this new site.
The changes I had made to this site had been only in the css and languages. I hope that the changes I made don’t get changed with the upgrade. I know nothing about hooks. I will study up on them. I read in another post that maybe I should have used hooks for my changes to the css files. Can someone confirm this. And point me to a tutorial about hooks and who to use them, keeping in mind I know nothing about them.
[QUOTE]After browsing through cs-cart site I see there is a great new feature to ver 2.1.3 multi box shipping.[/QUOTE]
You better believe it!
[QUOTE]The changes I had made to this site had been only in the css and languages. I hope that the changes I made don’t get changed with the upgrade. I know nothing about hooks. I will study up on them. I read in another post that maybe I should have used hooks for my changes to the css files. Can someone confirm this. And point me to a tutorial about hooks and who to use them, keeping in mind I know nothing about them.[/QUOTE]
Dsdewitt, the sooner you invest the time in learning how to incorporate hooks in your design or coding changes the happier you will be. As soon as you start incorporating them and then perform your next upgrade, you will then truly understand the benefits!
Here is a very simple & straight forward tutorial for using a hook for your skin CSS changes:
Got bowling tonight, so tomorrow I start Hooks school 101. I’ll setup another test domain and copy my current development site to it and try to hook all the changes I made to the skin css files.
But in the mean time do you have any thoughts on my first message in this post.
[QUOTE]But in the mean time do you have any thoughts on my first message in this post.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I gave you most all of my thoughts regarding how the Company Name is handled in CS-Cart (other thoughts could attract the “ole Ban Stick”). :shock:
As far as making all the needed fixes to properly display & handle the Company Name field, I have not yet tackled this & have been dealing with it best we can while hoping CS will eventually make the needed adjustments to properly display this field, in other words make it a predominant field within the billing & shipping address areas.
You should utilize hooks for any changes you make to cs-cart if you want to maintain some upgrade independence. if a hook doesn’t exist for what you need, add it. It is much easier at upgrade time to see a comment and a hook that doesn’t exist in the upgraded file than it is to sort through tons of small code changes trying to remember what you did a year ago. USE COMMENTS to bracket your changes. It will make life a lot easier.
