Direction on an inventory system?
New Drupal user here, and looking for some direction. (According to the learning curve posted by Dries, I am hovering around the "I suck threshold").
I have 6.x installed and running on Apache.
I am looking to set up an inventory system that I think is fairly straightforward. We are a printing company, and we inventory printed material for select customers. I need a solution to allow these customers to authenticate, then have access to .pdf or .jpg versions of their brochures, see quantity on hand, and be able to order from their inventory. The products inventoried will have already been paid for, so I think e-commerce is overkill. (open to criticism).
Here are my general requirements and thoughts:
1. Authentication- I am thinking about creating a Role for each customer (for permissions to the products for that customer), and assigning users to the Roles.
2. Inventory Items- Initially, I considered the ecommerce module for the inventory feature, but that might just over-complicate things. So I am thinking of using CCK to create an inventory item content type specific to a customer, and grant permissions to that content based on the associated Role.
3. Users - Once authenticated, users should be able to see their items in inventory via a thumbnail, in a list format along with a description, a quantity in inventory, item id number, etc. I would like to have an image viewer module that lets users "page through" their documents in a higher resolution preview.
4. Orders - Users need the ability to order easily, and have the amount ordered deducted from inventory. Again, I don't really need an ecommerce checkout, but I am not opposed to it either. Really, just an "order" button next to each item with a couple of fields for quantity ordered, ship to address, etc. will suffice. I suppose this could just auto-generate an email that gets sent to someone that will fulfill the order, although I'm not sure how to do that.
5. I need a way for administrators to easily submit new inventory items as they become available. Hopefully this can be accomplished by using the Image, Image Assist, and Image Cache modules to automatically take an uploaded PDF file, add it to the gallery, and generate a thumbnail for the inventory page.
6 Shipping, Payment, Cart integration not needed (yet)
OK, so maybe it's not so straightforward after all.
Any ideas? Am I going in the right direction?
Still struggling with this.
Still struggling with this.
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You say shipping, payment, cart etc are not needed at the moment but I would seriously consider choosing an ecommerce solution before making any other decisions. Alot of this type of functionality is probably available with one of the ecommerce modules and add-ons. Even if you don't turn on all the bells and whistles right away, it will save you a lot of headaches in the long run. Checkout the ecommerce and ubercart modules-- my personal preference is for ubercart but ymmv. Once you've evaluated how far you can get with your design requirements with an ecommerce module, you'll be better able to ask for more specific assistance.
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Thanks for the advice
Thanks for the advice WorldFalls.
I ended up going the Ubercart direction, and I think it did save me some hair. Actually, it worked really well. Ubercart is about as flexible as Drupal, and I was able to bend it to get the functionality I was looking for.
In case somebody is looking to do the same thing;
I used Drupal 6.x and Ubercart 6.x-2.0-rc3.
CCK - To create my custom inventory product types. (with fieldgroup to make nice sections in the product display pages)
ImageCache - The Ubercart module just sets up integration with ImageCache automatically!
Lightbox2 - Again, just worked right out of the box.
Views - to give me a headache.
Taxonomy Access Control Lite - Allowed me to give access to certain groups based on taxonomy terms attached to products.(Taxonomy terms that are completely integrated into the Ubercart catalog)
SMTP Authentication Support - To send all the generated email through my mail server.
Some other non-pertinent stuff.
I was able to leave most of the Ubercart functionality turned off. I only used;
ubercart core (of course) with cart turned on.
catalog
reports
stock
That's it. What impresses me the most about Drupal and Ubercart is how you can leave modules disabled, and everything else still works. How you can turn functionality on and off at will.....is amazing.
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EXCELLENT-- I'm glad it worked out for you and thanks for posting this update! It will definitely be useful to others in the future.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
Cungrats and thanks for
Cungrats and thanks for sharing your experience
Thank you!
davidw, I came into the site with almost the exact same question you asked originally. By posting the solution you ended up using, you have saved me a lot of frustration and learning curve. Thank you!