Creating multiple shipping zones and methods FAST

Hi,

I am faced, like many I'm sure, with the prospect of creating a very large number of shipping zones and sub-zones, and shipping methods in the manual shipping module -- one for each set of shipping price, options, and contiguous postcode range.

The interface does not seem to be at all efficient for the creation of large numbers of repetitive entries, every entry requires several clicks and often repeating the same information many times.

I suppose though that all of this must reside in some tables in my Joomla database. Once I create a few of them to see how they work, I supposed I could simply go into the appropriate tables of my site's Joomla database and add lines to the tables directly there, where it would be easier to duplicate the appropriate info between tuples.

However, I know databases can be much more complex than they appear so I don't want to botch things up completely in an effort to be efficient.

Is it possible to add Shipping Zone, Shipping sub-zone and Shipping Method entries this way? Has anyone done it and can offer some pointers?

Which are the specific tables that need to be modified for this to work?

Thanks for any good advice on how to approach this efficiently.

Thanks, I've now made a couple of entries and exported the table from the Joomla database to OpenOffice.

It is too bad that so much of the data is "serialized" as you say in the shipping_params field. If this were not the case, the job would be dead simple!

I will see about brushing up on my ODS macro-making abilities.

Unless you know a more efficient way to search and replace the items in that long text string?

In any case, is there any chance the shipping_params field could be "de-serialized" into separate fields in a future release? That would make using the manual shipping plug-in much easier!

Cheers.