What a pre-order can say¶
Pre-Order keeps one row per pre-order line of an order, and those rows are the record. The order statuses below are presentation on top of them.
A line¶
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Waiting on stock | The line is owed to the customer and the stock it watches has not landed. Nothing has been asked for. |
| Ready | The stock landed, or you released the line yourself. A line is ready before anybody has been asked to pay: the request goes out once every line on the order is. |
| Paid | The money is in. One-way — nothing in Pre-Order ever moves a line back out of it. |
| Expired | Nobody paid inside the payment window, or you cancelled the line. It is no longer owed to the customer and no longer counts against the stock everybody else is waiting on. |
An order¶
An order has one state, taken from its lines: anything still waiting makes the whole order waiting, because the payment request is all-or-nothing — one order, one link, one payment. Only when nothing is waiting does a ready line mean the order is ready to be asked for.
The date the screen shows for an order is the latest of its lines' dates, and "no date announced" counts as later than any date: a store cannot promise a ship date it has not got.
The three order statuses¶
Pre-Order writes these into System > Localisation > Order Statuses when it is installed, in every language the store has. They are named from Pre-Order's own language file, which ships in English only, so a store running another language reads English until somebody translates it.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pre-Order Received | Placed, nothing charged. Written by Pre-Order's own placeholder payment method as a deferred order is confirmed. |
| Pre-Order Payment Requested | Every line landed and the customer has been emailed a payment link. |
| Pre-Order Expired | The payment window ran out with nobody paying. A status of its own rather than the store's generic cancelled one, so the order list keeps saying what happened. |
A paid order carries no status of Pre-Order's at all: payment lands it on whatever your store's normal post-payment status is, which is OpenCart's choice and not this extension's.
You may move a pre-order to any status you like by hand. Nothing here moves it back — the Pre-Orders screen shows the status Pre-Order would have named beside the one the order carries, marked Moved, and leaves it at that. You may also rename or delete the three statuses; the rows Pre-Order keeps are unaffected, and a deleted status is written back at the next install.