By nofue on

Servus!

I'm working on a site where users should be able to buy downloadable photos. The photos are taken on various events, the names of the people photographed are not known (so there's no meaningful text or title to any single photo).

There are some requirements for the workflow:

Inserting:
a.) Photographer creates an "event" (Date, Location, Title)
b.) Photographer sets a price per image
c.) Photographer uploads a bunch of photos taken at that event, all pics get the price set at b.) and the Date/Location/Title tags. Ideally, the upload is a bulk upload of the highest resolution sold, automatically sized down by the server (as with imagecache)

Purchasing:
a.) User should be enabled to search for pictures using Date/Location/Title fields
b.) User should be able to run a slide show of that event with an option to "put this image into the cart"
c.) once the user is ready, he should proceed to "checkout" where all the pictures he selected will be shown (in a slide show of only the selected photos, even from various events)
d.) user should be able to select one out of three different resolutions/sizes
e.) user should be able to chose the payment method. Ideally, that would be

1.) using "bonus points" from the user account or
2.) using PayPal (or similar serves to either pay
i.) for just the current cart (without creating a user account) or
ii.) for bonus points (being added to the user account for to be used later)

f.) once payment is complete, the user should get some notification (whether by email or online) how / where to download the pictures in the desired resolution. That link should become obsolete after a certain period of time (chosen by the admin, side wide, usually set to "one download within one week", after that time the link will expire).

It seems most of the issues can be taken care of with Übercart, but some (i.e. bulk uploads of images, auto insertion of tags (Event/Date/Title)) seems not to be a feature of Übercart (yet?).
It seems Übercart requires me to provide some text and title to any product -- which isn't convenient with photos which usually don't have a meaningful text/title anyway…

Can you provide me with some suggestions / links to sites like the one intended / other helpful hints and suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Norbert

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

nsolop’s picture

nsolop commented

Have you finished the site? is it online?
Regards!

nofue’s picture

nofue commented

Well, the site got online in I think February, but I went for Gallery 2.1 (not 2.3, that had issues with my server OS) and I used Drupal 5 (because 6 was missing some modules by then) with the Gallery 2 module and it works pretty good so far -- my friend likes how it works and that's enough for the time being.

Norbert

-- form follows function

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

So, great idea, I have already thought about doing so. I also need a page where I should be able to sell my products (mainly photos and video) but also services (budgets witch are accepted must be paid also by internet.

How about making a small how to at least with info of how to get the work flow functioning? Or at least, could you post your knowledge sources?

Thanks in advance.

nofue’s picture

nofue commented

Actually, I wouldn't call that messy project from one year ago a good showcase at all. I just had to deal with a lot of issues, from Ubuntu server to Drupal 5 vs. 6 to Ubercart to Gallery. As 12+ months are a lot of time in terms of evolution of software, I suppose it's time to start from scratch again. Some guesses:

First, I'd look into Ubercart for that matter. Selling pictures and video is maybe possible already -- a year ago we couldn't make Ubercart to handle the very specific issues my friend had. Gallery is a great thing on its own -- you don't even need Drupal to make it a great photo selling site. I don't know how it would handle services, but I think creating an album with all the services for sale being covered by a special photo should do the trick in a very painless way… If you want to run your site on a language different from English, make sure the internationalization of Gallery works with your server software early in the project. Most Linux servers seem to be OK, but Ubuntu pre-8.08 caused some issues.

Hope this helps you some, all the best.

Norbert

-- form follows function