Experimental Dashboard Enhancement

Hi all,

Opencart is perfect for my requirements. I have been running a small online shop for more than year, and I'm very happy with it.

I had one issue though: although my order processing workflow is quite simple, I lost too much time in the OC administration interface, and working with it was too error prone. Here's my typical order processing scenario:

1. Check the mailbox for a new order. Remember the order number
2. log in to the OC admin interface, and get the order
3. get the invoice of the order and print it
4. prepare the parcel
5. now wait until the order has been paid (in my shop, I only accept prepayment by bank transfer or by PayPal). I get payment notifications by email
6. when a payment notification has arrived I have to match it to the order and check the payment amount
7. If the payment is correct, I make a Swiss Post 'Webstamp' which is an electronic postage stamp. For that, I have to copy-paste the delivery address to the Webstamp interface. Print the Webstamp and stick it on the parcel.
8. Send the parcel
9. Change the order status to 'shipped', and notify the customer of the received payment and the shipment (standard text). Archive the the notification email messages for the payment and the order.

The original dashboard isn't very helpful with getting a complete overview of the open orders. And especially matching incoming payment notification email against orders is cumbersome. So I decided to develop a dashboard adapted to my particular workflow.



The new dashboard lists all open orders (above the ruler) and the 5 most recent processed orders. Processing an order is basically reduced to 3 mouse clicks:

1. When an order has arrived, hit the 'invoice' button to generate an invoice and print it
2. When a payment notification has arrived, the dashboard automatically matches it against the correct order. So it is very obvious what order is ready to be sent. Make a Webstamp and send the parcel.
3. Finally notify the customer (with a standard text that can be changed), change the order status and archive the notification emails by hitting the 'shipped' button.

The new dashboard allows me to deal with 95% of the orders without having to log in to the OC admin interface, it saves me a lot of time, and it is less error prone.

Of course, that Dashboard only works for me and my specific workflow, and I think it's not useful to distribute the source code as it is now. I wonder if there is an interest to enhance the existing dashboard with some of the functions I implemented here. I'd be willing to make some contributions if there is an interest, and if I don't have to do it alone. (I am quite an experienced PHP programmer, but I don't know the OC MVC framework at all).

let me know, what you think

cheers

Rolf

Very interesting and I would be glad if we could do something together.

Well, the interest is not overwhelming. As we can see, there's just one positive feedback.

In that case I'm not sure if it is worth investing time in the development of an extended dashboard as described above.

best regards

Rolf