By mixersoft on

Hi, I'm somewhat of a newbie to PHP and drupal, but have so far managed to hack the workflow and publishing modules to do what I want. However, I am now trying to put together an eCommerce product for selling Pando packages and need some direction.

The background and my requirements are as follows:

  • Service: digital photo finishing. Simple enhancements and cropping for all your digital photos (i.e. exposure, red-eye, etc.)
  • Product: possibly hundreds of photos per transaction, at something like 5 cents per photo
  • Privacy/Catalog: I need a private image_gallery for each customer (going to try to implement via image+taxonomy+tac_lite)
    • no publically viewable product "catalog", just private image_galleries (image module)
    • customer can "tag" photos to create a "new" image_gallery,
    • any image_gallery (with a count of photos and a total price) can be added to the shopping cart
    • if "/products" is mapped to "/products/mine" then this is a personal "shopping cart" history of all created products
  • Cart/Checkout: I really want to use Drupal eCommerce to manage checkout and order processing. Big Savings here.
  • "Delivery": I'm expecting file sizes to be 100+Mb hence I plan to use Pando (www.pando.com) to deliver the purchased photos.

This is not exactly a file product because there is not pre-exisiting filepath/file to download. Instead, I'm really selling URLs to pando packages. Also, I've written some SQL to get the list of images (as nodes) for each gallery.

My thoughts are as follows:

  • from the image gallery nid, I can get a list of all the contained images/files and calculate the quantity, and price
  • the custoemr would essentially be adding the nid of the image gallery to the cart and purchasing it
  • with a list of node_ids, I can write some code to have Pando package all the related files and generate a Pando package URL
  • after payment has been received, I can make package URL available on the "/store/myfiles" page of the File product, and email the customer as well.

Questions:

  • is there an easy way to make any node type (i.e. image_gallery) a "product" with a calculated price and an "add to cart" link?
  • is it easier to hack the File product to eliminate the need to pre-set and verify a file path? or to reference a (pando) URL?
  • I've hacked the generic product to add a CCK-computed field for the image_gallery nid and quantity, but
    • I can't seem to update the price field in the right place. (I can go straight to the {ec_product} table, but it doesn't show up until a couple of refreshes)
    • and the price needs to be a computed field, not admin entered.

I think basically I need someone to help me understand if I'm going to have an easier time modifying the File product or writing a new on based on Generic.

Thanks in advance. I am happy to contribute anything I produce.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

mixersoft’s picture

mixersoft commented

I saw this

/**
 * Node-managed file functions
 *
 * The following hooks allow third-party modules which contain files to treat
 * their files as products.  This module allows downloads only when the
 * products have been purchased.
 *
 * See also the ec_media module (ecommerce/contrib/ec_media).
 */

/**
 * Determine which node types are eligible to be treated as products.
 *
 * Invokes hook_ec_pandopkg_nodetypes.  Third-party modules must implement that
 * hook to be treated as products.
 */
function _ec_pandopkg_get_managed_types() {
  static $cache;
  if (!$cache) {
    $cache = module_invoke_all('ec_pandopkg_nodetypes');
  }
  return $cache;
}

/**
 * Determine whether a node is an instance of a node-managed product.
 */
function _ec_pandopkg_is_managed($node) {
  // sometimes node passed in is not really a valid node
  if (!$node->type && $node->nid)
    $node = node_load($node->nid);

  return in_array($node->type, array_keys(_ec_pandopkg_get_managed_types()));
}

How would I try to extend category or taxonomy to become a product? Do I write a new module, or just edit the core module? What is the best approach for this?