Daniel Shaw

Hi @gnfb

Sorry to say, I’m no longer working with WordPress or doing any client work right now.

Hi @gnfb

Thanks for clarifying. To answer your questions:

I was looking for setup integration with the costs, zone

The WooCommerce site has a tutorial covering how to apply costs, here: https://woocommerce.com/document/flat-rate-shipping/#setup-and-configuration

Shipping is a feature of the WooCommerce plugin. This plugin simply automates one particular zone configuration, so there’s nothing to document beyond the installation steps.

In the rural you list all the postcodes but you dont in the non rural

There’s two points to keep in mind:

• WooCommerce has no concept of rural and non-rural addresses by default
• A rural address can only be verified by its postcode

Due to the first point, WooCommerce doesn’t understand there can be a relationship between a zone region and a postcode.

This plugin configures shipping zones so that if a rural postcode doesn’t exist for a zone, the non-rural zone region is used instead. This approach aligns with a default WooCommerce install (to be clear, zone regions are baked-in to the WooCommerce plugin) and keeps the plugin as simple as possible.

does that mean that the user has to use Manawatu-Whanganui, New Zealand in there address for it to verify it or does the say 4500 work somehow?

Here’s three scenarios with outcomes:

• If a user only enters Manawatu-Whanganui, the address is presumed to be non-rural.
• If a user enters Manawatu-Whanganui and an invalid rural postcode, the address is presumed to be non-rural.
• If a user enters Manawatu-Whanganui and a valid rural postcode, the address is presumed to be rural.

This behaviour goes back to the point above that WooCommerce has no concept of rural addresses being a sub-zone within a zone, or that there can be a relationship between a zone region and a postcode. You can test this out yourself with the default shipping calculator by entering a valid rural postcode and a mismatching zone region — a shipping rate will be displayed for the the shipping zone with the rural postcode.

It’s possible, of course, to manually set the shipping zones up to use postcodes for non-rural addresses if you prefer.

Hi @gnfb

This plugin has no configuration requirement beyond installing and then activating it. By default, it does nothing more than what is mentioned in the plugin description: “This plugin creates shipping zones for standard and rural delivery across the North Island and South Island of New Zealand“.

Here are the installation instructions. The plugin uses WooCommerce’s native shipping zones feature so it’s safe to deactivate the plugin once it’s been successfully activated.

Hello @robaxxx

Yes, that looks to be exactly what happened. A couple of things here it’s safe to do:

• delete the zones with the default titles
• deactivate and uninstall the plugin

On that second point, activating the plugin configures zone data in the WooCommerce database. The plugin does nothing beyond this initial configuration, so it’s absolutely safe to remove it completely from the site.

Apologies for the slow reply, I no longer work with WordPress and only check in here occasionally.

Marking this topic as resolved due to no follow-up.

Hello @thorned-rose,

Take a look at the following Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_New_Zealand#Allocation

In the Allocation section, you’ll see how NZ postcodes are assigned within each region. Do you think this information will help with identifying Auckland region postcodes for removal from the North Island Rural shipping zone and/or copying them to the Auckland Rural shipping zone, in bulk?

In terms of updating the plugin: it’s unlikely to happen because I stopped working with WordPress some time ago.

Best,
Daniel

Hi @nztrinkets001,

Thanks for using the plugin ??

This is a general web development question. It’s not specifically related to this plugin and it’s outside the scope for support, I’m sorry.

You may like to see if either of the following links will help get you started on a solution:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/62009659
• https://gist.github.com/neamtua/bfdc4521f5a1582f5ad169646f42fcdf?permalink_comment_id=4741065#gistcomment-4741065

Hello @gnfb,

The issue you describe is beyond the scope of this plugin. It has no impact on how rates are displayed in search engine results.

My suggestion is to check the configuration of the method you’re using to push products to Google Merchant.

Hi Michael,

This plugin can be deactivated and uninstalled immediately after it’s activated. Shipping zones are configured upon activation; once set up, the Woocommerce database manages the shipping zone configuration.

To resolve your issue you can deactivate the plugin. The shipping zone configuration will not be affected when doing this.

Updating the plugin is not a high priority right now, having personally moved on from using WordPress. This means there’s currently no schedule to update the plugin.

Addendum: this issue wasn’t resolved due to it remaining unclear why the shipping zones configuration did not complete.

Hi Mark,

Nothing obvious stands out in your phpinfo, alas, however this being resolved host-side does seem most likely at this stage. The only other potential thing that comes to mind: do you have a security plugin installed on the site? If yes, it feels unlikely this would be responsible but worth trying an install without it active.

I’m happy to do a little troubleshooting directly on the site to help find out what’s going wrong. If you’re up for this, probably easiest to continue via email: [email protected].

As a basic check: I’ve just verified the plugin continues to install successfully for the most recent WooCommerce version, 7.5.1.

Based on this:

North Island (Rural), Zone region = New Zealand
South Island (Rural), Zone region = New Zealand
North Island, Zone region = Everywhere
South Island, Zone region = Everywhere

…it seems something is preventing the zone configuration for both postcodes and regions from completing.

I won’t have a chance to look at this more closely before next week (at the earliest), so perhaps the efficient solution for your specific case is to add the postcodes manually to the rural zones.

It would be interesting to hear if you experience a successful install of the plugin on a clean WP/WooCommerce installation, or even in a different environment: for example, https://instawp.com/.

Best,
Daniel

Hello Mark,

Yes, a successful install should see postcodes populating the “Limit to specific ZIP/postcodes” field for each rural shipping zone. There’s an image beneath the “How it looks” heading showing what this looks like, here: https://danielshaw.co.nz/woocommerce-rural-delivery-shipping-nz/.

What version of WooCommerce do you have active, please? There was a recent change in WooCommerce affecting how New Zealand regions are assigned (please see https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/code-dropping-out-with-latest-woo-update/ for details) but I think you’d only experience that particular issue if you’d installed this plugin on a pre-7.10 version of WooCommerce, then updated WooCommerce.

Hi @clintd75,

Good to hear you’re sorted, thanks for letting me know ??