Ecommerce application and solution - php

Here's my predicament. I'm working with a designer who has a very unique layout for his ecommerce site. It's kinda like a table/tier based system where you buy a certain amount of points. I need the ability to have user accounts etc and it will all be in joomla. There's many options such as magento, virtuamart etc. but basically what I'm saying is... will it be possible with any particular platform to transform the products so much so that can still use the platform? here's a screen shot...
http://www.one2designs.com/images/screen.png
Basically It needs to some way integrate into joomla, allow for user profiles etc, and I guess be so customizable that it can be transformed into that look.

Both Joomla and Virtuemart allow for 100% of customisation of the templates used. The process is simply:
Design
Cut and slice into HTML
Build Joomla template, product pages.
Further, the screenshot shows simply a list of 7 products, so either Table with 7 columns or a ul, li construct will work.
Is there anything else product wise you need to manage? It doesn't look like people will actually add more than 1 product to their "shopping cart", so a simple form manager like RSForm may achieve the same purpose. There are E-Commerce plugins for most newer form managers now and it should also not be too hard to link up third party payment gateways as a one off.

From the look of your image, that is simply a product with various options that are user selected. You would need to change the way the product options are displayed to fit the design, but other than the display, there is nothing unusual about a product with many options. Everything below the radio buttons is pretty much irrelevant as it is only option details. Virtuemart could be made to do this fairly easily.

Related

Completely custom Magento interface without shop

I have been searching but have not found much information on this. Would it be possible to completely override Magento's frontend interface? What I mean with this is completely remove the shopping cart, menu's, product listings, everything, and replace with a completely customized interface, which will not be used for a eCommerce portal.
I just found out that our customer does not in fact want a eCommerce solution, although we have built a lot of functionality on Magento and it would be a shame to have to re-write EVERYTHING on another platform and still build a ordering framework as well.
So my question is this, can you build a theme on Magento that only shows parts of the system completely unrelated to the actual 'shop' and where would I find information to figure out how to do this? I'd like to keep the custom frontend in Magento to easily re-use the product view blocks, etc. but Magento itself is not a system our client wants.
I have thought of an alternative where the Magento shop is merely placed in a sub-directory and used as a sort of 'engine' to run the eCommerce side of the system and building a completely different system which integrates with Magento, the downside of this of course being that we would have to rewrite completed work as well.
What would be the best route to follow?
Here is one way to go about it:
Edit the homepage via the backend and enter the following code in to it:
{{block type="catalog/product" template="page/homepage.phtml"}} this will allow you to display products on the page.
Make sure that when you enter the code you can see html markup (and not just the output)
Make a completely customized webpage showing whatever you want

Modx custom tv with multiple inputs

I need to build a custom tv in modx that will all a user to select a image, a title and a date.
Can't seem to find any help other than the docs with although detailed don't answer my problem.
Anyone done this before and are able to advise me further
Cheers
I'm not 100% sure, if this is what you're trying to archieve, but I think multiItemsGridTv (MIGX) for modX revolution is what you want.
From the docs:
MIGX (multiItemsGridTv for modx) is a custom-tv-input-type for adding
multiple items into one TV-value and a snippet for listing this items
on your frontend.
It has a configurable grid and a configurable tabbed
editor-window to add and edit items. Each item can have multiple
fields.
For each field you can use another tv-input-type.
Essentially, you can make up a set of multiple different template variables (including images), that always belong together. If you then assign your MIGX tv to a template, you can enter as much of these sets as needed per resource.
You can download it via package management or from the modX Extras Repository.

developing module with drupal

I have a website which is up and running on drupal. Its product based website. I developed by creating my own tables and writing php code using php filters. I never used module concepts. Since the site is running well, so i am thinking to move to module concept. so wanted some help here, like how to do it.. i have gone through module development concepts also.
requirement.
1. Admin should be able to create new products like Mobile, Camera.
2. He should be able to define product properties and properties for which user will rate on.
3. Admin/ second admin should be able to create new sub products under products like mobile - nokia 8850 , nokia 9980 where he enters details of product properties also.
4. A listing page for all the sun products under main product. and from listing page we go to to main sub product page where user rates the product.
My confusion : should i create a new table or drupal takes care of all the requirements. and how do i start with it.
update : clear picture of requirement
ex :
1. 1st i add a product "MOBILES"
2. Then i add properties for this main product.
3. Then i start adding sub products under MOBILES i.e nokia 1100, samsumg 2200 and etc.
while adding sub products, in this page it gives me a text box for all the propeties i defined while creating the main product MOBILES . So is this possible using CCK.
You're right to consider using modules and following the "Drupal way". Use CCK + Views and Drupal will take care of the table maintenance and querying for you.
As already mentioned, you will need to get familiar with the CCK module. This module will allow you to create new "content types", which in your example would be the different product types and their attributes. Here is a good overview video on CCK. With CCK you can define new content types and Drupal will create the basic content creation forms for you and hide spare you from all the database details when you're working with it.
The Views module is essentially a query builder and will allow you to create views of your content. There are all sorts of related modules that can help you render your data as charts, grids, lists, slideshows, tables, etc.
There is a slight learning curve but once you get past it you'll be able to build new things pretty quick.
Update: Just another thought, if you are really needing to create some kind of classification system you should look at Taxonomies.
It sounds like you could do all of this with modules, without needing to do any php coding at all. Check out (if you haven't already) cck, views, and fivestar.
In response to your update, sounds like CCK and Node Hierarchy should do everything you need.

Magento Complex Attribute: Value(s) = (Drop-Down item + Text Field input), and need an "Add Another" button

I'm in the early stages of planning and developing a Magento-based site. My company carries around 20,000 items.
One of the most valuable features on our current site is the ability to cross-reference our items based on our competitor's item number. Any one item of ours can have between 0 and 30+ Competitor Cross-References. I need to figure out how to achieve this feature in Magento.
What I'd like to do is configure a 2-part attribute that is searchable, but not displayed on the product's page, and be able to have a varying number of values. In the Add Product Page, it would look sorta like this:
Cross Reference(s): [Drop Down of Competitor Company Names] + [Textfield For Competitor Part No.] (+ Button to Add Another Cross Reference)
It doesn't look like there's any way to do this with Magento out-of-the-box in the Admin interface, so I'm ready to extend the core with a module of my own. I've started digging around in the 10,000 files that make up a Magento install; but I could really use some help on this.
Thanks in advance to any who read and reply!
You may be able to use Custom Options. Maybe a simple solution would be to put the CompanyName & PartNo in the same option and later (once you have Magento experience!) make a custom interface to make it easier to administer (with the dropdowns).

Drupal best practices for custom admin section

Is this a common task in your Drupal work when you're asked to create a custom admin section in Drupal for your content?
For instance, you have a few content types and user wants not only to view them, but to search using different filters, to add new items - all inside the same admin subsection.
In essence, this is classic search/grid/record screen/pages and while in typical Drupal distribution content management screents are kind of scattered around, I am talking about more organized spage, e.g. in which Grid (View) also has "Add new" link and you don't have to scroll to "Create content" menu which relates to a different section.
What is your experience and opinion in this relation?
I'm actually working on something like this right now where I work. We've built a custom module to solve Drupal's biggest problem of having unorganized content by organizing it in a nice tree structure. What we've decided to do is go ahead and create a whole new section within the admin just for managing content through this module (it contains a lot more functionality than just a tree structure). There were two big deciding factors when deciding to do this.
We knew we weren't going to be releasing this module so we didn't need to worry about integration with other modules because any such integration would be done by us.
The non-technical staff that this was presented to preferred this method over having several different admin pages with different pieces of functionality on each one, despite all the functionality being related. They viewed at as simply being easier to use.
The point behind my explanation is this: if it makes sense in your situation, then I'd say make either a new section or a new page with several tabs on it. There's a lot of deciding factors to consider:
Do I (or my) clients like the Drupal admin as is?
Do I need to worry about integration with third party modules?
Is time of the essence (this one is a big one)?
How extensible do I need the new admin page(s) to be?
Is upgrading to the newest version of Drupal of big importance (from 5 to 6 and later from 6 to 7 and so on)?
Many non-developers I've talked to abhor the Drupal admin and most content editors I've talked to or worked with prefer having a single admin page they can go to to manage all of their content. As a result, our setup is well received by our clients even though some within the Drupal community may not agree with it.
you can use views_bulk_operation module to show content (or users) to execute (batch) operations on them. in this way you get a sortable grid with search capabilities (exposed filters), pagination and the possibility to execute custom bulk actions. from here it's easy to add a link "create new" in the view footer. furthermore, you can use link as "local tasks" to organize views in tabs.
usually i use simplemenu for the admin backend and i hide the navigation menu in the sidebar for all but administrators.
Another option - much easier to deliver - would be to create a new menu only visible to the administrators - and dependent on the content displayed - with links to the pages for common tasks. Particular views, for example, or to add new content of the currently displayed type, etc.

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