05/23/2018 00:00:00     Presta Fabrique Blog    Comments 0
Easy country and zone manager - drag and drop Prestashop countries

Ease the onboarding process of Prestashop and save time with this super easy, drag and drop country and zone manager. Re-arrange the countries how you and your carrier demands it.

After the more complex premium ones, it was time to develop some simple, more essential and axed on single-function modules. These modules of course, are no less valuable than their premium counterparts, because, rooting from their simplicity, they overwhelm existing problems that can cause a ecommerce business or even a client some trouble and frustration. So right after our cart share plugin, a new development is here, that focuses on countries and zones and remedies two shortcomings: easy (re)assignment of countries to zones, and on click activation or deactivation of countries, all or group-based.

Of course, this issue also came up with the development of a webshop, since the allocation of the Prestashop zones did not fully meet the client's expectations, as the carrier with whom he had partnered, used a completely different zone allocation than default, so he needed to rename them, create new ones and rearrange the countries inside them. This is fundamentally a huge task and we soon realized that there was time consuming as well. And probably situation was known and experienced by several other developers and webshop owners too. So given the motive, the solution was born shortly after a small brainstorming and basic idea, in the form of the Easy country and zone manager.

What does it do and how does it serve a country manager?

First of all, it enabled us to fully reset this section of Prestashop: with just one click we emptied all zones. Then, using the built-in interface of Prestashop, renamed them, created the new ones, and then re-loaded the module, we began to arrange the countries into the corresponding zones, as described by the partner carrier, all this with having the “Automatically activate / disable countries when moving in / out of zones” switch function enabled. This means that if you drag a country to a zone, it will be activated, if it is extracted from a zone, it is deactivated. This may also result in some countries not being part of a zone, but that is fine anyway, since if a country is inactive, you can’t checkout with it or use it in an address, regardless if it belongs to a zone or not.

What to look out for when using the country manager module for Prestashop

Changes will be saved automatically and without refresh at the end of each operation. The speed of this, depends heavily on the server, so it can be fast and slow, and especially in the latter case, make sure that the operation of your previous step is completed before performing a new one. Of course this is indicated in each case by a green message box in the upper right corner.

And finally, an important notice and warning: careful with the “Empty all zones” button, because we can easily reset and ruin our entire work. The real benefit of this option is at the beginning of the whole country and zone setup sequence. However, it is to be borne in mind, that if we click this option, not everything is lost instantly, because a popup window warns us and draws attention to the operation weight, where pressing Yes or No, we can really submit the option, or in the latter case, we can cancel the execution of it.

Check and buy Easy country and zone manager module