UK Royal Mail postage setup problems

-- HikaShop version -- : 2.3.4
-- Joomla version -- : 3.3.6

Hi I hope someone can help as I am having serious problems getting the postage setup properly, and reading through the many threads where this has been discussed has just left me more confused.

I am new to hikashop and only have a little coding experience so please bear with me on any possible fixes.

In the UK, Royal mail postage is controlled by both weight and dimensions. Currently using the manual shipping options I can only see the possibility of controlling by weight and volume. Unfortunately I have some products that have a volume less than that calculated for say postage option 1 but actually one or more of the dimensions fall outside of the allowable size for this.

For example I have postage options

1. Max 100g and can only have max dimensions of 240x165x5mm
2, max 750g and can only have max dimensions of 353x250x25mm

Now my problem is that have items that are under the 100g but have a dimension or two that fall outside of the 240x165x5 for option 1 but are still within the volume created by these dimensions so I get incorrect postage options showing in the frontend. Is it possible to make the volume option a dimensions option?

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for the quick reply. Is this likely to be something that gets developed as part of Hikashop?

I ask because from reading through the forum there seems to be a lot of UK users having the same issues as me and due to the complexities of the the weight/size restrictions it may put a lot of users with little to no coding experience off from using Hikashop, which would be a shame as it most over areas it is a lot more intuitive than other options.

Can you suggest any resources where I can research the skills needed to write a custom plugin? bearing in mind I have never done it before.

Many Thanks

Martyn

P.S would it be possible to add this functionality into the standard manual shipping plugin? just a thought as there are already length width and height in each products options.

I'm having the same issue, I can make an estimate to ship stuff in the UK (a parcel is £2.70 up to 2kg which makes things simple but shipping abroad is difficult because the prices get a little crazy.

Has anyone got a method they'd like to share here?

Cheers

Hi Jerome,

Do you mean this has now been updated and is in the manual shipping plugin or that it will still need a separate plugin?

If it needs a separate plugin can you advise on any online resources to guide me on how to do this?

Many Thanks

Martyn

Hello Martyn,
1.
It will need a separate shipping plugin.
2.
Reading the developer documentation will probably help you : www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/6...tation.html#shipping

Thankyou Mohamed,

It looks like I best teach myself how to write PHP then. Not sure where to start. If I am successful is there a way of handing the plugin over to hikashop as I am sure a lot of other UK royal mail users would find it useful.

Kind Regards

Martyn

Hello,
Sure .

Hi Again Mohamed.

Having had a look at what I need can you advise the location of the files for the current manual shipping as I think I would just like to add this functionality to this to keep it simple.

Hi,
If you want to edit the manual shipping method code, you'll have to edit the code the "hikashopShippingPlugin" class of the "administrator\components\com_hikashop\helpers" file and of the manual shipping plugin files.

Hi,

Can you advise a list of all the file names that are parts of the manual shipping plugin so I can work out the relationships between the files.

Hi Jerome

Thanks for your reply, My apologies for my last question but i have done very little coding past modified css as was struggling to understand the relationship between files and which ones would need to be edited to achieve what I need. From your email am I correct in think that although there is the manual.php file this is the helper file I will need to edit to get the functionality I need?

Many Thanks for your patients

Martyn

Hello,
You won't have to edit the manual.php file, you'll have to create a new shipping plugin, the best solution will be to create a "custom manual" shipping plugin, but if you want to add custom options you'll have to create a new shipping plugin, note that you can check all our shipping plugin to understand how we coded them.

I dont really have anything to add to this except to say that I would also really apreciate a Royal Mail plugin.

Peter