southshorepizza:
I am thinking they want a drop down box to select from that would be populated from the coupons table.
My best guess too...
Would the cost (money and risk) really be worth the benefit? Especially considering how easy it is to navigate coupons already using the built in Zen Cart coupon admin page?
Store owners can use "admin" --> "gift certificate / coupons" --> "coupon admin" to look through the available coupons for their store. This existing tool lets them page through coupons very quickly to find the coupon they want to apply to an order. This tool also shows all the settings on each coupon and what the coupon does when applied to an order.
If the customer did not enter the coupon (or provide the coupon information if they called in) why would a store owner erode margin further (by spending the time to see if a valid coupon exists and then applying a discount coupon to the order)? Why even bother with a coupon if this case? Just lower the cost of the products if you plan to give every customer the discount... Or use the "group discount" modules... Or shell out the $$ for some of the order total discount modules written for Zen Cart...
<rant>
A dropdown with coupons could be problematic, especially on mature stores with a large number of coupons and gift certificates / vouchers (both are stored in the same database table). Would you really want potentially hundreds of items in a dropdown?
Next I'll hear "just filter them to ones which are applicable to the order"... So now you want to add additional processing time for each and every coupon? Not to mention issuing a considerable number of SQL queries? All needing to be performed EACH AND EVERY time the order is loaded (or edited) in Edit Orders?
Okay, and now that we have filtered the coupons... How do you know which coupon does what? Sure you have the coupon name in the dropdown, but it is only a name (and is not required to be unique). Coupons in Zen Cart can be applied in many different ways and contain many different settings...
So even with this "dropdown", in order to know what a coupon does (without applying it to the entire order and starting over back at the first paragraph), a store owner would need to go to the Zen Cart coupon admin page to see what the coupon does. So in this case, no time has been saved (quite the opposite actually)...
Add on top of this all the coding required to support such functionality (everything above, AJAX code for selection, PHP handlers for fallback when JavaScript fails or is disabled, etc). And now what happens if ot_coupon is changed in a future version (in order to filter the coupons we needed to directly use a method from this order total module)?
Who is going to PAY for the cost required to implement and maintain a coupon dropdown? Especially given the limited
</rant>