By internets on

Hello,
I'm going to be converting a product catalog ( http://www.vintagepowerwagons.com/catalog/pdf/group1-engine.pdf ) into a web friendly format. I'm wondering if drupal with an e-commerce or some other module would be a user friendly / viable solution.

There are ~100 pages similar to the above linked catalog pages. It looks like there is going to be a lot of cutting / pasting / saving images / content. I have tried a few PDF to HTML converters with mixed results. Adobe Acrobat didnt fair to well. I tried PDFtoHTML an opensource convert which worked nice for web copy but not so well for images. Any suggestions for PDF to HTML conversions are appreciated.

The goals:
List products online, make them easily search-able / maintainable and mix in the various related tips, tutorials and diagrams. I do not want to allow customers to order these parts online, I would like them to be able to put them in a 'cart' of some sort to keep track of the parts the customer is interested in. To order customers must call in to make sure they are getting all the correct parts.

currently the products are maintained with Adobe Indesign, a new pdf is generated and uploaded to the site. This also works well for printed the catalogs, just send all the latest pdf's to the printing company and it works well.

So I'm looking for a solution where it is easy for end-users to update products and maintain the online web friendly product list with the pdf' product list without having to make multiple updates for a single product change.

Any suggestions for modules? Has anyone done anything similar to this with drupal?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

nexxer’s picture

nexxer commented

Hello,

I'm interested in this as well. Did you make any progress with the catalog? How did you work with the PDFs after all?

internets’s picture

internets commented

No progress on this, don't know if I'll be doing it, but I'm still debating whether it would be easier to use drupal or write a simple ruby on rails 'shopping cart' without a checkout. Either way it seems there would be a lot of data entry or copy / pasting or product attributes / images. Unless there is some way to convert a pdf catalog into organized xml or a database / csv format. I know you can convert pdf's to html but the output is not useful for this case anyway. So no progress on this for the time being.

macroplan’s picture

macroplan commented

As soon as you want to add "checkout" you put yourself into the realm of a shopping cart application. You will go CRAZY trying to piece all the needed applications to make this work. Us small businesses are best off with a "packaged" shopping cart solution. Take a look at the Ubercart module for drupal.

There is no "magic bullet" for getting your data into a new site. Many shopping cart applications offer an excell spreadsheet import feature that will allow you to mass import or update your product files - a common need.