ploughguy

I am coming up to speed on the runtime solution for CC.6. I have read the “literature” for developers regarding extensions and plug-ins, installed the example and visitor stats demos and it all makes sense. Snippets are nice. But... (you were waiting for that...) is there a solution for templates that mirrors the hooks for PHP? Is manual intervention the only solution? Thanks, as always, for your help. Russ

Not a bad idea - change the "Add to Cart" button to "Tell me more" with the same functionality as the product title link, which is a bit subtle. Gotta make it obvious. The Jony Ive design philosophy of dark white links on a light white background has no place in an online store.

Suffin' cats! How did I miss that? Good ole Noodles. What a great guy. I have this image in my head of Noodleman at work, sitting on a sheet of cardboard outside a tube station, Staffordshire terrier wearing a red bandana at his side. Noodles is wearing an ex-army greatcoat, Doc Martins with holes in the soles, an ancient red tea-cosy as a hat, and worn woollen fingerless gloves. He is typing on a battered Dell laptop with a faded Windows XP label under the keyboard, plugged into ... something. The X keycap is missing. A gravy-stained paper plate with some coins on it has the words "Developing CubeCart Plug-ins - Please Help" scrawled around the edge in black ash from discarded cigarette butts. Periodically, man and dog take a slurp from a large foam cup of instant pot noodles, their sole source of nourishment. The dog looks much healthier than the man because people pat him and give them the last of their pies. Noodleman, however, is not that attractive. But at least he occasionally has a shave. It is amazing that a starving man can write such good code. Probably all due to the love of a good dog.

These are fine solutions, and the category product options is a must-have. Always wanted it, ever since 4.3.4. And as the Bearded One says, the template can be doctored. But I aver that the template should already be correct - every store that uses mandatory product options is going to tell the customer they have made an error when they Add to Cart. This is not good retail.

Update - kind people have very gently pointed me to a plugin that I had somehow missed. Disregard this until further notice. R To be compliant with Australian tax law, I need to be able to reliably deliver tax-inclusive prices, line totals, subtotals, totals and total tax amounts that add up and don't have any rounding errors introduced by quantities, discounts and option supplements. This is harder than it looks. I don't need per-item taxes, just everything tax-inclusive and a "total includes tax of $x.xx" at the bottom of the page. In my 4.3.4 store I doctored the cart calculations to work in tax-inc numbers. It has been faultless for 8 years. Which is why I am still running 4.3.4. Attempts to work with tax-ex numbers and add the tax in later invariably led to totals that were a cent or so out for some edge cases or totals that did not agree with the sum of the parts. Very unattractive on a legal document. I need a solution for CC 6.1 that guarantees correct tax-inc line totals, subtotals, totals and tax amounts that all add up with no rounding errors, no missing cents and everything compliant and customer friendly. Any thoughts? PS - I know people in Australia use CC as it is. This is permitted for Business-to-Business stores (such as my packaging supplier) because I am not the consumer, and the tax I pay to him is credited against the tax I collect from the consumer. It is also permitted for retail business with a turnover of less than $50k per annum, aka a hobby. However, any Australian using such stores will be somewhat annoyed by the Bistromath on the invoice - it is not considered a good look - unprofessional. Un-Australian and all that. If it has five bucks written on it, then five bucks is what we pay.

Envisage, if you will, a CubeCart store that has a product with options. A customer opens the category, for example, Cats. A list of cat products are produced - Persian, Tom, Burmese, Mexican Hairless (yech) etc. I am in the midst of setting up a global criminal network, so naturally I select Persian and click its "Add to Cart". However, Persian cats come in colours, so there is a product option. The storekeeper angers the mighty criminal overlord by misrepresenting the function of the button. It is not going to "Add to cart" at all, well not yet. Clicking the button actually invites one to "Select product options". To pile insult upon insult, the product page opens with an angry red banner that effectively says "Hey bozo, you forgot to select the product option." To prevent all cat-monging CubeCat storekeepers from possible thermonuclear or biohazard retribution in the future, I propose that the button caption be changed, when appropriate, to Select Options, or if there is only one, which is probably the most likely case, "Select <optionname>" giving, in the kitty-case, "Select Colour" or for Western Pacific Coast types, "Select Color". Either solution will prepare the buyer for the upcoming option selection and obviate the need for the angry red banner. If the criminal overlord customer really is as dumb as a box of rocks, perhaps we could make the option selection field flash, pulsate or jump around to attract attention to itself rather than flash the red error sign. There is, of course, a language implication here, so the fancy version will require some thoughtful contemplation. "Select options then add to basket" is longish, but it creates an accurate expectation about the future. Of course, it does get one a multi-line button. I do like the idea of a custom "Select <whatever> and add to basket text though. Maybe a plug-in entrepreneur could provide this as a plug-in? Gotta say, though, the product options with option groups and stock level matrices is a damn fine thing.

HUBAR hacked beyond all recognition <--- Needs an "up".... Handy term - describes my existing store perfectly. Which is why I am being so noisy right now - trying to avoid it happening again.

Whaddaya mean, "Many versions back"? That's the version I am currently using! Cripes, it was only back in 2009 that I set it all up! The skin I am using for testing 6.1 is Foundation - one would reasonably expect it to be aiming for functional perfection, no? I have not started monkeying with optional skins yet. Gotta say, I'm loving the results of 8 years additional development. CC 6.1 is beautiful. Except for this particular problem. I'm on the Pacific Coast too - same country?

The shopping cart has some bad customer-facing ergonomics when a promotional coupon is provided. The ultimate functionality is correct, but the user interaction is not up to CubeCart's otherwise impeccable behaviour. To demonstrate: Create a Promotional Coupon Create a cart Assign the Promotional Coupon to the cart Customer gets a red banner further down the page, below the payment method options, that says "Please select a payment method." The discount code is not accepted. Customer selects payment method. Now customer can go back up the page to apply the coupon a second time. Is there any reason why there is a dependency between the payment method and the coupon? If so, should the layout be revised so the user is not sent down and then up the page to sort it out?

Question: How do I create a discount voucher in CC 6.1? I can find gift certificates (effectively a deposit) but not discount coupons. The two are quite distinct from an accounting and tax point of view and not interchangeable. Question answered: Moments after I posted this, of course, I found them under Promotional Codes, mysteriously filed under Inventory. Which is where Coupons were listed in olden times too. So I have no excuse. Background: My current quaint version 4.3.4 store allows me to issue a discount voucher for $10 or 10% depending on whim and the amount of customer dissatisfaction that I am trying to mitigate. I use it in the unfortunate case when the shipping calculator cooks up a number that is embarrassingly different to the stamps on the box. I don't feel the need to issue a refund (after all, they thought the shipping was acceptable when they placed the order) but the discount voucher adds some goodwill and may well initiate another order. This is clearly not a gift certificate - it is, in this case, a credit.

Right-oh, now we are cooking. I stole some time to do some more testing. I have been delaying installing the Havenswift adv adm addon because I want to get value out of the one-week evaluation and guaranteeing testing time requires duck alignment in several of life's many strata. If you see what I mean. However, I have these gaps, and it looks like your beautiful extension will plug many of them. I have prefixed each one with my interpretation of the fit based on your extension's Features page. Does Havenswift have the time to review and comment? Thanks in advance for what looks like a very useful enhancement Russ. Complies: Restrict shipping solution to a list. Complies: Tax calculated automatically. Probably complies - may require template customising: Customs declarations, aka commercial invoice and sometimes called a pro-forma invoice, although I believe an accountant might disagree. Is the pro-forma invoice intended to provide a customs declaration? If so it requires a consignment note number and a declaration with signature and date. (Presumably it can be customized to do the job, but if it is correct out of the box, so much better.) Almost definitely not: Tax-inclusive prices and totals on invoices and related documents (this is an Australian legal requirement - item prices, extension prices, subtotals and totals must all be tax-inc, with a single "Includes GST of $x.xx" at the bottom. I suspect this should really be a whole-of-CC development to provide a suite of options for price, total and tax presentation. Other countries undoubtedly have different rules again. This should not be too difficult to do (said the customer) because I observe that tax translation of prices is done by a class, so the change should be relatively contained. Unknown: Order inventory sort on refresh. This is quite important. Firstly, it gives a neater result if all similary items are listed together in the order. And If some pillockxxxxx customer is dictating an order over the phone, the order of dictation will be completely random and sometimes contain duplicates. When the duplicates are pointed out (if they are detected) there will be two possible responses: No, I only need one of those, or Yep, I really need two. Sending an extra one that they don't want results in increased outbound shipping, return shipping and the issuing of a refund, which usually eliminates any profit that the order might have generated. Sorting the inventory when the refresh button is tapped will at least put the dups side by side. Sorting the items at least puts the dups adjacent. Aggregating them into a single item might even be better. At least highlighting the duplicates would be useful. Unknown: Add tracking URL (specific to shipping partner) and tracking number to "Order shipped" email and customer-viewable order information if tracking number has been recorded. As in "Track your order at http://www.tnt.com with consignment note number 999999999. Unknown: Add vendor note to customer to tax invoice and to customer-visible order information. Unknown: Item numbers displayed in the order inventory listing. Unknown: Record actual shipping cost Unknown: Recording shipping payment method, selected from a list (e.g. I currently use CC - paid by credit card and SS - Stamps or Satchels from Stock. I run a monthly report that selects all CC shipping payments by partner and produces a CSV file that I import into my accounting system MYOB to create the shipping purchases, and another that creates the associated payments. This reduces accounting and reconciliation effort immensely,) This is fairly simple for me to do, but so much better if you at least capture the data. Template change?: Omit "Discount" field on invoice and cart totals unless the Discount value is non-zero. It is generally good bottom-line practice to not remind people that discounts are even a concept unless they really deserve one. I think this can be done by doctoring the template. Template change?: Add mobile phone number to the address block (second line under the name) to help reduce returns. Template change?: Display expected weight Template change?: Add legislated (in Australia) "TAX INVOICE" and ABN (= vat ID) to invoice. Customers cannot claim purchases as deductible inputs unless they have a compliant tax invoice. Template change?: Australia Post addressing standards (and many others) prefer that the town name is in upper case. I think this can be fixed in the template using the smarty UPPER variable modifier.

Thanks for the help. I am planning to follow the process you have described. I need to build a bunch of new plug-ins to get the functionality I have added to the 4.3.4 store. Then I will, as you suggest, develop a migration process and test until acceptable, install a fresh installation with a new database then migrate the data from my old store to the new store, and then switch them over. This also means that if the migration process fails for some reason, the old store is still there, up to date and ready to resume its faithful service. I will create a plugin to mirror the sequential order number functionality that I already have. Who knows, I might even publish it. Thanks for the advice! Russ

Huh! That'd be it. I assumed that was there only to add another blank item line (which it also does...) Clearly I have missed some documentation somewhere. I will dig around to avoid further embarrassment. The plug-in mechanism is impressive - full credit to the (maybe stable) genius that cooked it up. Nice work. Thanks for your help. I have noted your enhanced order admin offering (and other useful looking stuff) - I will check it out once I fully understand the scope of the basic product. There several nice looking options that plug gaps in the raw functionality. Thanks again. Now, back to the tax calculation problem. Russ

Hi, My apologies in advance for this - I have almost certainly done something (or not done something) that is causing this problem, but I have not been able to solve it on my own. I have a CC 434 store which I am planning to update to version 6 once I figure out how to get it to do what I want. I have downloaded the 6.1 installer onto a test system. The installer creates a database with a single product. I created myself as a customer and that worked nicely. Now I am trying to create an order in the admin console to sell myself a test product. I cannot get CC to save the order. I feel as dumb as a box of hammers for having to ask this question, but I have messed about with it for hours and I am flummoxed. I have defined a single tax for Australia at 10%. The order builder is not calculating tax automatically, but then it does not do it in 4.3.4 either, so I am not sure that is a problem. (It is nice that it now calculates the total all by itself.) The primary indicator of trouble (aside from the order not being saved) is that the inventory item line has gone red (ish). I changed the inventory for the test product to have 100 items in stock. Problem persists. Please put me out of my misery and explain what I have done wrong (or, more likely, not done.) Otherwise I will have to spend tomorrow reading code... Thanks for your help. Russ

Thank you for your reply. I already found the checkbox for pricing, but the cart logic is all based on ex-tax pricing: if ($product['tax_inclusive']) { // Remove tax from the items by default, everything internally should be sans-tax The prices, extensions and subtotals presented to the customer in the cart and the invoice are ex tax by default. If there is an existing plug-in that displays all numbers inc-tax, it will save me a lot of work. In particular, I am expecting that ex-tax calculations will result in rounding errors in the line extensions so the invoice potentially totals lose a cent per line. The problem arises because the ex-tax price is rarely a whole number of cents because the "presentation price" that is made attractive to the customer is the tax-inc price. This was a problem with 4.3.4 too. I have not yet dug in to 6.1 to find the full extent of the horror, because I am hoping someone else has already done it.

The Question: Is there an existing solution for tax-inclusive pricing throughout cubecart? Prompted by: In the downloadable 6.1.13 store, the test product is priced at $6.99, the subtotal is $6.99, and the total is $7.69. This is un-Australian. Update Found the "Tax inclusive" flag in the product definition Pricing page. Background: I have been running a heavily modded 4.3.4 for far too long, and it is time to update. My store is like walking into a Dickensian haberdashery, which is charming in its own way, but the kiddies today demand polish and sheen and html 5 and good phone behaviour, and we must deliver. God forbid that they should discover what real life is like... To my great surprise, when I search the Cubecart fora for "tax", I find nothing. Either CubeCart's tax handling is perfect, or we are all avoiding it (boom-tish!) Here in the civilised paradise of Australia, there is a law that says that if you hand over the price marked on a product, it is yours. None of this "How much is it?" "Five pounds, guv." "Excellent, my man, I'll take it." "That'll be five pounds anna 'arf, guv" nonsense. We feed people to their worst nightmare out of sharks, spiders, snakes or murderous outback hitchhikers for that kind of behaviour. There were, in fact, actual riots about it when the government (which promised at the election before the election before the tax was proposed "We will never, ever introduce a GST" but explained after the more recent election that everyone, ob-viously knew that this meant "never, ever within this current term" - true!) surprised us all with the concept. We didn't really care how much we paid. We just really, really cared that we knew how much it would be. All retailers that turn over more than pittance must, by law, list tax inclusive prices everywhere that Joe Public and Mrs might see them, and also point out that $x.yx of GST is included in the total value of the invoice. Joe and Mrs accepted this as a fair compromise, furled up their banners, drank their Molotov cocktails and retired to the beer garden for some not-yet-craft beer. Anyhow, I sorted all this out in the 4.3.4 store by declaring that prices included tax all the way through the food chain. In the cart, export orders (i.e. for delivery abroad) had the tax shaved off all prices and the total. The scope of the change was limited to the cart itself - the tax is x/(100+x) (i.e. 1/11th) of the invoice total, and for export orders, all prices at 100/(100+x)th of the quoted price. Because of this tax-inc display, we calculate the tax-inc price then round it to the most appealing number (so naturally, the Test Product above will be rounded to .. $7.49? Nah, make it 7.99! However the tax is still 1/11 of the displayed price.) In a perfect world, customers that log in with an account that has an export delivery address by default should probably see tax free prices through-out, but if they don't want to live in the land of sunshine, surf and sharks then they can just be pleasantly surprised by the lower prices at the end. Has this sort of thing made it into cubecart these 8 years hence? I cannot see a setting labeled "Prices are tax inclusive", but it may be labelled something else.

Yech - I have a Cc4 store that I want to upgrade. I currently have a sequential order number add-on installed and it is a dealbreaker for me to go back to the standard user-hostile (and admin-hostile) order numbers. I don’t understand why is is such a big problem to have sequential numbers. Can someone explain why it can’t be done? I gather from this posting that there is no supported alternative?

Al, this must bring back fond memories - or nightmares... The amusing part of it is that the store itself works. It is just the admin functions that are broken. However the coding of the admin side is quite distinctly different from the customer-facing part. This is a good point that you make. SSL is enabled for the whole site for the production system, but not for the development system. Is there something SSL-ish in the database that I need to change to switch it off? R

I suggest you put that cup of coffee down and swallow whatever is in your mouth before reading further. We don't want any nasty accidents. Safe to proceed? OK. I have an online store that runs CubeCart 4.3.4. I tricked it up so it does some nice things with shipping, made the invoices Australia compatible and fiddled with the tax handling to make it agree with the letter of the law for GST. Added some display stuff etc et etc. Installed some enhancements to get linearly numbered invoice numbers and stock levels for product options so it does pretty much what I want it too. Doing it all once was OK, but doing it again for version 5, then version 6 ... you know how it is - rather go to the beach, the races, the bar, the proctologist... Maybe for version 7. Anyhow, I have had to move my development environment to a new machine and it almost works. I use a subversion/Coda rig to keep it all in order. In the interests of general hygiene, I copied the production system installation back from the live server to make a test environment, rather than muck around the ancient setup from the original system. Oh, and it all runs on a Mac. Has done for years. However, the test environment is only partly functional. The store itself is good except that the images are not showing up. (probably need to rebuild the image database, whatever that does. That ain't the problem.) Problem is that the admin screen returns with this: Not Found The requested URL /~russ/shop/~russ/shop/admin.php was not found on this server. The url to the shop itself is http://localhost/~russ/shop and that works fine (except for the images.) Something is infecting the admin URL with an extra "rootRel" from global.inc.php. Any ole-timers got any thoughts about what this might be? Russ

Thank you! The hosting co has confirmed that I tripped not one but four mod_security rules. We are now working out how to deal with it until I can upgrade to something more modern.

OK, so I have found that the config is, in fact, stored in the database. My user is a super-user so I would expect it to pass any update checking done by CC itself. Does the config update change any files, by any chance?

I say, chaps, I have a CC 4.3.4 installation that has been running an online store since 2010 or so. I am about to go on holiday and I need to take the store offline. When I try to save General Settings, I get a 403 error. My hosting service likes to monkey with file permissions in unexpected ways, because they know what's best... Please tell me what the name of the file is, and the appropriate permissions, so I can take the store offline and go on my holiday. (I will be glad when it's over so I can come home and relax...) Thanks for your help Russ OK, now I am more confused - I have found the code that saves the settings and it does indeed save into CubeCart_content with name = config. So - question - Why the 403 error? Thanks again for your help. Russ

Does anyone have a cubecart consistency checker? I am trying to extract some quarterly product sales figures from CC 4.3.4 and there is an inconsistency between the order_sum data (as viewed in the order builder) and the order_inv data (as viewed in phpmyadmin. I am missing a single item for a single order in the order_inv. Since there is some redundancy, it can be used to check for missing items in order_inv (and, indeed, for missing sales in order_sum.) I am hoping some samaritan has built a consistency checker that compares the order item data in the summary to the exploded entries in order_inv and reports any errors. Since the underlying database is not transactionally managed, there is scope for these inconsistencies and I would like to find the little devils without going though every sale by hand.

Just noticed that this post is number six by views. Forum rules is first, then some release note postings, then a problem with paypal, then this. So I think we can safely say that product options is a topic of interest. PG