Duplicate Account Modification - Need for long term solution

[DivaVocals]

One note about the duplicate account modification:
Dwests fix to prevent COWOA from creating duplicate guest accounts is awesome and it works perfectly.. However for shops who are upgrading from older versions of COWOA and those converting over from older versions of FEC/FEAC will STILL be left with multiple guest accounts which can wreak havoc if you are sending out customer e-mails or gift certificates.

Admittedly while the duplicate account fix is an effective solution to this issue, it is not the BEST solution.. A BETTER fix would be if there was a way to SAFELY combine the duplicate guest customer records COWOA created in older version. I can articulate WHAT needs to be done, but the SQL script needed to execute this is a bit over my head to create.

The SQL script needed to do this would need to check that if there are multiple customer records and ONE of them is a standard account, that the standard account record is retained while the guest customer records are discarded. If there is no standard account then it will need to retain only the most recent guest account record while discarding the others.. The SQL needs to update all order records associated with the discarded customer record ID's and re-associate them with the retained customer record ID.

[ghost]

SO... the code to do this would need to be created in php. something like the links manager installer. I've been learning some and more then likely can create it. I've been having a fight trying to decide which install method is better... Auto vs. Manual... The hacker in me says to go for the Auto... we can use this!! OK, think I found a way to keep it safe and working... old installs of link manager has the same problem of off setting the database and leaving things behind when upgrading. So I need to code in some sniffers to clean things up during installs/upgrades.

[DivaVocals]

Exactly Dave.. Though I understand and can articulate the issue and the solution, it's WAAAAAAY over my head to even begin to come up with a solution.. I would be super grateful for any help you can lend in this effort.. :)

[ghost]

But you get it!! sorry for the mess on the forum... Anyway,
the beta version works from 1.5.1 to 3.... no
problems what so ever... the only thing that should be in the readme is
to compare and only insert the lines in between the BOF COWOA and EOF
COWOA for the core file edits and they would not have any problems...
also reading the version lines in the header to see which is a newer
file... but that wouldn't make sense to most..

I enjoy helping out coders, part of the open source way of things... I'm
working on a smarter installer for Links Manager, should fit into COWOA
too.. I may offer to work on ZC1.6, it's COWOA is not as far along as
ours, but it has a better flow and may degrade to work with this one
too. so may be bouncing it around on GitHub too.

If you need help or have some other question feel free to contact me.