By cbmeeks on

I'm from the Dark Side (.NET/MS SQL) and have been toying with Drupal for a little bit. I am very impressed so far.

However, I am trying to integrate it with my business. Currently, I have some tables in the same db as Drupal that I need Drupal to interact with.
On my site, I want anyone to be able to register for free but be able to pay for restricted services (using the custom tables).

I could do what I need in about 5 minutes with ASP.NET but I am new to PHP/MySQL. I also want to do things cleanly, securely, proper, etc.

Ok, enough rambling, here is what I want to do:

• Create custom input forms for my tables. Nothing fancy here. Just need an EASY/CLEAN/FAST way to setup some text boxes that will CRUD my table. Seems like CCK will do this but I can't figure it out.

• Install a good upload module with a progress bar and multiple uploads. AJAX/bells-n-whistles would be nice here.

More to come but any suggestions on those points would really be appreciated.

Thanks!
cbmeeks
http://www.signaldev.com

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

CCK is for nodes, not custom tables. I'd suggest against trying to make your pre-existing custom data into nodes if you're not familiar with the Drupal API and node system.

You can easily enough make custom forms/CRUD with a custom module using the forms API and the database abstraction functions. This module I wrote does this for 3 custom tables: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/member/

As far as paid access, one thing to do is within your custom module, create a menu callback (page) to display the data. Your module could also define a permission necessary to view that page. You can then assign that permission to a role, and users can pay to get that role added to their account.

I haven't tried them, but these commerce module seem like they could do this latter thing:

http://drupal.org/project/lm_paypal

http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce

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Work: BioRAFT

behindthepage’s picture

behindthepage commented

Reference site for Drupal functions
http://api.drupal.org/

Bottom three links on this page will give you info on forms
http://api.drupal.org/api/5

gpdinoz
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

Regards
Geoff

cbmeeks’s picture

cbmeeks commented

Thanks guys.

Looks like I will just try and develop my own module.

http://www.signaldev.com

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

I'd started a sort of generic CRUD module, and after working on it this weekend it seems to be working now with Drupal 5.x if you want to give it a try:

http://drupal.org/project/object_driver

This is exactly designed to give you a relatively easy way to CRUD data in a table.

You would need to write a small module based on the included example module to make available the appropriate parameters for your table. Look at the README and example module.

For context, this started out as "concept" code related to this issue: http://drupal.org/node/113435

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Work: BioRAFT

cbmeeks’s picture

cbmeeks commented

I'll check it out...thanks!

http://www.signaldev.com