This one is a little odd, but is very handy when you have over 200 items you ship! We have all of our kits and items stored on shelves and when the shipper goes to pick the items, its handy if he doesn't have to go back and forth across the room to find all of them. So what we do is we sort the items so that they appear in spatial order. This means all the items that are next to each other on the invoice are next to each other in real life!

goes without saying at this point, but do a db backup before you do anything to the db.

CREATE TABLE `shipping_sort` (
`shipping_sort_id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`products_id` INT NOT NULL ,
`sort_order` INT NOT NULL DEFAULT '0'
)

Make an admin page that will help you populate this table with sort orders!

Theres a lot of ways you could do this - here's our file that uses some quick and dirty javascript to make things click and draggable.

shipping_sort.php.zip

Find line 115-121 of admin/includes/classes/order.php

      $orders_products = $db->Execute("select orders_products_id, products_id, products_name, products_model,                                                                                                                                                                 
                                              products_price, products_tax, products_quantity,                                                                                                                                                                                
                                              final_price, onetime_charges,                                                                                                                                                                                                   
                                              product_is_free                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
                                       from " . TABLE_ORDERS_PRODUCTS . "                                                                                                                                                                                                     
                                       where orders_id = '" . (int)$order_id . "'                                                                                                                                                                                             
                                       order by orders_products_id");

and replace it with

      $orders_products = $db->Execute("select op.orders_products_id, op.products_id, products_name, products_model,                                                                                                                                                           
                                              products_price, products_tax, products_quantity,                                                                                                                                                                                
                                              final_price, onetime_charges,                                                                                                                                                                                                   
                                              product_is_free, ss.sort_order                                                                                                                                                                                                  
                                       from " . TABLE_ORDERS_PRODUCTS . " op left join shipping_sort ss on ss.products_id = op.products_id                                                                                                                                    
                                       where orders_id = '" . (int)$order_id . "'                                                                                                                                                                                             
                                       order by sort_order");