eMerchant Version Notes
Version Notes - Main

4.8.8 released 11-11-2008

Added search tools in the inbox message history page. Message history may now be searched within the subject, body, or both; for a matching word or phrase. The search may also be limited to a date range (today, last 7 days, last 30 days, last 3 months, this year, last year, anytime). Messages matching the search criteria display in a list with icon/links to the right of each listing for reply, forward, delete, customer profile and history. The search tools are currently added to the customer message history and not in the vendor history.

4.8.6 released 8-27-08

Modified and improved AutoBill generation of recurring bills. AutoBill will now calculate the date to send the next recurring bill by first figuring out its due date and then subtracting the "send x days before due date" from it. If you set "send x days before due date" to zero the next bill will be sent on its own due date. The Convert Quote to Payable Bill page will now validate the reminder date and pop up a message informing the user if he has entered a value that will make the reminder date before the bill itself is created. The reminder will now never be sent if it is time to send the past due message instead (if the cron job for autobill.php has been inactive for a while).

4.8.1 released 5-6-2008

Added billing templates for Authorize.net ARB and eMerchant AutoBill. Billing templates are used to create Authorize.net automated recurring billing (ARB) or eMerchant AutoBill automated recurring bills from orders that are initiated through the shopping cart and through eMerchant.

4.7.6

Add capability to send attachments and to send CC and BCC when sending email from eMerchant.

Added IMAP as an option in eMerchant email configuration. IMAP loads messages faster and handles larger attachments than POP3.

The AutoBill recurring bill script now sends a report to the eMerchant inbox when the autobill cron job has been run. If any payment reminders, past due notices or new recurring bills are sent by the autobill script a list of the messages will also be reported to the eMerchant inbox. The report data is saved in a new database table named emerchant_autobillreport.

4.7.4

Completed the AutoBill recurring billing features. Recurring bills can now be set to send (number of days) before due date. Reminders can be sent (number of days) before the due date and past due notices can be sent (number of days) after the due date. The messages support tokens for %orderid% and %duedate%. Recurring invoices may include an automatically generated message "...for service from (beginning date to ending date).

4.7.1

Added checkboxes with option to delete selected messages from the eMerchant inboxes.

4.7.0 7-5-2007

Added feature to send reminder message (with a link to pay) from Unpaid Sales Reports in Edit mode for each unpaid invoice that was created using the eMerchant autobill system.

When you install AutoBill the autobill.php file needs to be edited. Because it is being run by a cron job it needs to contain the path to the AShop installation. This is why the script has been split up in two parts: autbill.php (which needs to be open source) and autobill.inc.php (which contains the actual autobill code).

Modified viewquotes.php so that the state and zip code appear when there is not a customer name (from a quick quote).

4.6.5

Modified editpostatus.php to only accept todays date or earlier. When a future date was mistakenly entered as the bill date, the bill for the PO to not appear in unpaid bill reports without first changing the "To" date to a future date greater than the bill date.

4.6.4

Changed the date settings for AutoBill creation to days before/after the due date. The default values can be changed through settings in the admin panel (the eMerchant configuration page). There is also an "Update" button next to the due date box which lets you change the default messages if you change the due date.

Added link to filter Customers With Recurring Billing, which appears at the top of the Manage Sales page if AutoBills exist.

All messages sent to customers from the admin panel are now saved in the eMerchant customer history if eMerchant is available.

The sales reports will now link to the invoice for an unpaid bill (invoice) if one is available. There is also now a link to the eMerchant customer history in the admin panel customer history page. There is a new icon that will open the customer history in a new window. You need to be logged in to eMerchant first.

Added automatic rebilling and billing reminders.

4.6.0 02-22-2007

In emerchant history.php, if an order does not include any vendor products, the [Status] text/link does not appear in the page next to the orderid/link.

Fixed the return to quote link in canned comments for quotes and orders.

Wholesale orders are now fully supported by eMerchant.

All admin notices sent by AShop now post directly in the eM inbox if the ashopmail is set to the same address as the one used in the eMerchant configuration email setting. If the addresses don't match the notices will be sent as regular email just like before.

Invoices (unpaid orders) can now be created and an invoice can be sent from eMerchant. Unpaid invoices appear in Unpaid Sales Reports. The emailed invoice includes a link to checkout, which includes an order ID parameter. Payment can be made through any of the available payment options. When payment is completed, the order is activated and a confirmation receipt is sent.

4.5.7

In customer history, for order records, the order ID number is now a link, which opens the original invoice in a browser.

4.5.2

In customer history, in listing for order history, the order number text is now a link, which opens the original receipt in a _blank browser

4.5.1 11-28-2006

Changed link text for "Close" PO to read "Void" in saved purchase orders and in the order related purchase orders status page. To void a PO for an "Open order", save it first and then click the "Void" link. The PO will be removed from reports and the vendor cost for the PO will be set to zero value.

4.5.0

Fixed - After setting incorrect email address in eMerchant configuration and attempting to fetch mail, even after correcting the email address setting the mail would not be fetched from the POP3 mailbox. The code to unset the maillock was inside an if statement when it should have been outside. Because of this the maillock wouldn't be unset when the connection to the mailserver failed, which would prevent any mail from being fetched in the future if you had initially used incorrect values for the mail configuration.

Fixed - When searching for a number that does not exist, instead of an error message the customer.php page reloaded with empty form fields. The customer search will now display a "No customer found!" message when there are no matching results.

The customer phone and email search will check both the phone, email and alternativephones, alternativeemails fields now.

There is a new "Delete" link next to the Unconverted Quotes count in the left menu. Clicking it will open a page where you can enter a date. All quotes before that date will be deleted.

Fixed - Editing of POs didn't fully work. The editable shipping field would contain incorrect values in some cases.

In Message History for Vendors... when you clicked to go to the next page of vendors message history it would take you to the Customers Message History page instead.

When a PO was found by searching for the PO number from vendor.php and then an email message is sent to the customer from the icon (top right), the page reload "cannot be found...". The edit quote page had the same trouble. It was caused by the reloading of the page and fixed by Changing the composemessage.php script to output the "Message sent" text in a div tag instead of reloading the page. This has been done for both purchaseorder.php and quote.php.

Purchase orders are generated for each open customer order that has vendor products and displayed in the Open Orders report. When there is more than one vendor's products in an order, a PO is created for each vendor. Sometimes it is necessary to close a PO without actually shipping it. For instance when substitute products are shipped from another source. Previously there was a Close PO link in the purchase order page, which closed all POs relating to the same customer order. This is changed so that it only closes the one that is being viewed and does not close all other related POs.

Fixed when a customer was found by partial email address, emerchant was replacing the customer's email address with the search criteria. For instance, I entered "jval" in the email address and the customer profile opened with "jval" in the email address field. Then I sent a message to the customer and emerchant saved the partial email address and used it for the send to. I didn't notice it at first and then I went back and manually changed the email address to the correct one jval@unc.edu, which fortunately is in the original receipt, and sent the receipt again.

Fixed error, which appeared on one site. Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: Called with an empty time parameter. in /home/theselfe/public_html/ashop/admin/login.php on line 0The strtotime()". This function is regularly called with an empty value in the login.php script - but this doesn't usually cause any trouble. It seems that there is a certain php configuration that is more sensitive to this. Modified login.php to check for empty values before using the strtotime() function. It will probably not cause any trouble on other sites since it has worked several years but if anyone else reports this problem the new login.php scripts will fix it

4.4.0 2006-08-16

Changed the emailpo.php script to include the stylesheets in the html code to resolve issues with fax gateway and message formatting when sending purchase orders to a fax through an email service.

Changed the name of the ashop.gif to the new adminlogo.gif in the eMerchant and Wholesale logins.

Fixed bug in eMerchant profiles there is a button labeled Add Comment at the bottom right of the customer's profile, which did not work when the Save Changes button was clicked.

Fixed find customer by phone number so that spaces between the numbers are ignored.

Fixed bug in composemessage.php where timestamp for previous message was occasionally incorrect.

Fixed state indicated in quick quote was incorrect when sent by email.

Added eMerchant only payment options, which are not available to online shoppers so that manual and offline CC processing can be recorded in eMerchant orders.

Added a button on the editnotes and editvendornotes pages that takes you back to the quote or PO after editing the canned comments.

The Open Orders report was sorted by paid date but the displayed date was when the order was registered which can be different from the paid date if you use the manual or offline payment methods. Changed the sql query to sort by the same date that is displayed on the page.

Improved the open orders report query method to speed up report results.

Fixed bug in customer history, which was not reporting the shipping amount in a PO after it was modified and saved.

Re: Method to mark purchase order with sent date without actually emailing the PO to a vendor. You can select "No recipient" in the drop down list when you send the PO which will simply mark it as sent without actually emailing anything.

The company name will now be saved when you add a new customer and the shipping address will default to the same as the billing address. The company name will be included in quotes, PO's, receipts and admin order notices.

Long product names caused wide page and horizontal scroll bar. Long product names are now truncated in the drop-down selection box in order to avoid the wide page.

Quantity selector for each product/lineitem was a drop-down selector, which did limited high quantity orders. Changed to text box, which defaults value of 1. It was a select box before because the onChange event handler could then be used to automatically update the displayed amount for the new quantity. Added a calculator button, which is now used to update the amounts after a quantity is changed.

Added chronological message history listing for customers and vendors.

Added customer profile merge feature. In eMerchant when you search for customer profiles and find multiple matches you can now check a checkbox for the ones you find and click a button at the bottom of the page to merge the selected profiles into one. This will move the separate email addresses to a list in a new box on the Edit Customer Profile page and move all orders to the selected merged profile.

Back slashes were being inserted by the Magic Quotes feature of PHP (when enabled on the server) and at times would be inserted where not needed. This is fixed now.

The eMerchant (user) source is now recorded. It is included in the admin notice and will be used later to generate sales operator activity reports.

Removed inactivity checks when composing messages.

Fixed when replied to message with attachment, the file attachment became the "Original Message" and the original message went away.

Added icon to indicate when there are attachments to messages.

Added permission spam blocking, accepted domain list, and spam bin. Messages received from senders who are not existing contacts are saved to the spam bin. Messages from the contact forms and from known contacts go to the inbox. The spam bin can be reached through the link in the left menu. Spam messages may be moved to the inbox individually and then the entire spam bin can be emptied easily. The accepted domains list can be edited through the eMerchant configuration page in the AShop admin panel.

Changed sales tax and shipping options in quote.php. Both the shipping and the sales tax can now be changed in a popup window that is displayed when you click "Edit" next to the calculated value. The values on the Edit Quote page will now always be automatically calculated when you change something but you can still change them to a custom value using the popup window.

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4.3.2

Added a new link on the Edit PO page next to the "Order Reference" which will let you close all related POs for an order. It sets the "shipped" date for the record in the "orders" database table so that vendor products in the customer's order do NOT appear in vendor Open Orders reports and a purchase order is NOT automatically generated for the products.

Fixed a bug in quote.php that caused the sales tax to be discarded when a quote was printed, emailed or converted.

Fixed shipping amount so that it is overridable when creating of purchase order with credited product amounts. Previously it would add the calculated shipping amounts for each product and could not be changed manually.

Added security feature to prevent multiple logins by the same user. If another user tries to login with the same username he will just see this message: "That user is already logged in!" until the previous login has been ended or inactive for at least 30 minutes. There is a safety mechanism to log out a specific user in case of an emergency. Send "logout=username&logoutpass=adminpass" to the login.php script to log the user: "username" out immediately. The "adminpass" part should be replaced with the AShop Deluxe administrator password for eMerchant.

Fixed availability field was not stated correctly in mailquote.php

Corrected variable name in the emailquote.php script. When creating a quote with credits for shippable products, the shipping calculated correctly in quote.php, but when sent the shipping amount was zero.

// 4.3.1

Added ability to credit returned products in quotes/orders. Credits for returned products are equal, but opposite to the value of added products. Product credits add a negative shipping amount for each product to the shipping total at the bottom of the quote/order. The shipping total is editable and can be overwritten with a specific value before saving or sending.

Fixed security hole in formmail.php script, which could be used to send spam. The spammer included a complete email message with all headers inside the "name" field (the name of the sender). It could potentially be done with any script that collects form fields and sends the result through the php mail() function.

Fixed - In eMerchant customer history, click on the order [status] link. The next page has a button and status indicator for each associated PO. The status indicator always said Open PO even when it should have said Sent PO, Shipped PO, or Closed PO.

Fixed new purchase orders created from new customer orders were not populating the products automatically (after recent addition of new PO from scratch features).

Changed the pop3.php script to set default values for From and Suject fields instead of simply discarding the message and displaying an error message.

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4.2.6

Manually created POs can be assigned to specific customers by entering the customer ID number. Customer history now displays manually generated POs.

Added an option "No recipient" in the To listbox when sending a PO that will let you mark the PO as sent without sending it.

Added ability to create PO from scratch without requiring previous customer order to initiate it.

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4.2.2

Widened the email windows and fixed escaped quotes. PHP magic_quotes was adding backslashes. Added code that checks if magic_quotes is On and then unescapes all automatically escaped characters.

In the mailformtemplate.html, which defines the contact form that is used by mailform.php. Fixed field name tokens (used to repopulate value field upon validation page reload). When underscores were included in the token, upon initial loading of the form page, the token would appear as editable text in the text box.

Added automatic unsubscribe function for mass emailings. When the mail fetcher finds a message with the subject line "REMOVE" (case insensitive) it will not store the message. Instead it will set a field - allowemail - in the customer table for the sender email to "0". The emerchant/cleaninbox.php will also do this with customer records for both failure notices and "REMOVE" messages.

Added a clean up script for the inbox which will remove delivery failure notices after a mass mailing. This script will remove both the database row and the email file for most delivery failure notices. emerchant/cleaninbox.php

Fixed two different bugs in the readmessage.php that causes the incorrect date and email address to be displayed for vendor contacts, it was still sent and saved with the right email address and date.

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4.1.2

Change link to Admin convenience link so that it opens in a _blank browser.

Display Time In Message Window

As soon as a quick quote has been saved it will now display a link at the top "Create/select customer profile" which will open the customer search/create page but without the quote section. This page works exactly as usual but when a customer profile has been created or found you will now see a button labeled "Select" at the bottom of the page. Clicking it will assign the quick quote to the selected customer profile and make it a regular quote.

Added tool tips.

Made shipping amount(editable field) automatically entered into new purchase orders.

Completed vendor contact links and history so that each contact can have separate history, which is also included in the main vendor history. Each contact can have a separate email address and phone number.

Added drop-down selector in find vendor area, which lists existing vendors.

Fixed inactivity check. Was timing out after 20 minutes even after activity occurred within the 20 minutes.

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4.1.1

mailform.php will work from any subdirectory of the AShop installation directory. You just need to copy the script and the files mailformtemplate.html and thankyou.html to the subdirectory to make it work. It will also display a validation message when the form is submitted without the necessary fields and use a standard subject ("Mailform message") when the subject field is missing.