Installation

Requirements

  • Craft CMS 5.0 or later
  • Craft Commerce 5.0 or later
  • PHP 8.2 or later

Install using Composer

# go to the project directory
cd /path/to/my-project

# tell Composer to load the plugin
composer require johnhenry/craft-order-lifecycle

# tell Craft to install the plugin
./craft plugin/install order-lifecycle

Install using DDEV

ddev composer require "johnhenry/craft-order-lifecycle:^1.0.0" -w && ddev craft plugin/install order-lifecycle

Install from the Plugin Store

Go to the Plugin Store in your project’s Control Panel and search for “Order Lifecycle”. Then press “Install”.

Post-Installation

Once it's installed, most event tracking starts straight away - no extra configuration needed. One event (checkout started) needs a small template change, covered below.

Create and Add the Order Lifecycle Field

The timeline is a custom field type, so first you need a field using it, added to your order field layout. See Field Type for the full step-by-step.

Enable Checkout Tracking

Nearly every event on the timeline is logged automatically - but not checkoutStarted. Craft Commerce doesn't fire a native event when a customer lands on the checkout page, so you need to add this yourself, somewhere in your checkout flow:

{# Example only - add this wherever your checkout flow actually lives #}
{% set cart = craft.commerce.carts.cart %}
{% if cart and cart.email %}
  {% do craft.orderLifecycle.logCheckoutStarted(cart) %}
{% endif %}

This is just an example of the pattern, not a fixed location. "Checkout template" is shorthand - your setup might call it something else entirely (an address step, a cart index template, a single-page checkout partial), so add the tag wherever the customer first commits to checking out in your build.

Skip this and the timeline will simply never show a "Customer visited checkout" entry - nothing else breaks, but that piece of the picture is missing. See Event Tracking for the PHP equivalent and more detail.

Verify Installation

  1. Go to Commerce → Orders
  2. Open any order
  3. You should see the Order Lifecycle field with a timeline (may be empty for orders created before installation)

What's Next?