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Classified Ads module
AntiHero118 - June 1, 2009 - 17:13
Hello,
I am wondering if someone has commercial Classified Ad module that is for sale, or has created a more robust version and are willing to sell their module. I can't find any sites with modules for sale.
I need a Classified Ads system that is more robust than the currently available module, it needs to:
- Allow anonymous users to post classified ads
- Email submitting user a receipt of classified ad
- Hold ad for moderation
- Be sortable by category and sub category
- have contact form for users to reply to ad without giving out anonymous users email
Thanks for your time.
- Anti
Selling modules
It would be pretty unusual for you to find a Drupal module for sale. Because modules are GPL, there's not much point in selling them. Instead, the Drupal community economy is around selling services. So you are more likely to have luck finding someone to customize the module for you than finding one to buy outright. Of course, it's always possible someone has a module already that they'd be willing to sell as a one off thing, but you won't find sites set up for the purpose of selling modules.
Michelle
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I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)
contributed vs. custom
There's nothing in your description that can't be accomplished with a collection of contributed modules and is something you (depending on your aptitude and time) could build yourself.
That said, there are many advantages (via a paid consultant/developer) to creating a totally custom solution optimized and tailored for your specific need. The truth is many contributed modules try to be all things to all people, but end up doing everything kind of mediocre. Sometimes the time and expense it takes to get a contributed module is behave and look properly could be better spent building a custom one-off module. This is not intended to disparage the efforts of the excellent Drupal development community (myself included), but it's impossible to adequately foresee and address every individual application scenario.
Anyway, you might want to consider building a prototype of your application with contributed modules and see how far that gets you to your goal.
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"I remember that sound. That's a bad sound."
-- Gwen DeMarco
OpenX Integration with Drupal
My suggestion is that:
If you need real ad-management features beyond what is offered by the Ad-module (Drupal), you should implement OpenX and then integrate that with Drupal (several methods already available). OpenX will provide you with a great deal of power in managing all kinds of ads and content suppliers.
The above approach will leave to OpenX what it is best at, and to Drupal what it can do really well
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Drupal CMS Implementation, Theme UI/UX Design & Development
OpenX for classified ads?
I did not know that OpenX could be used for classified ads. I thought it was only a solution for banner ads and text ads in order to promote commercial product/services for various advertisers which pay for the number of impressions/clicks.
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PHP5 Zend Certified Engineer
Christian Roy
Subscribing!!
Subscribing!!
You don't need a complete
You don't need a complete custom modules. You can get most of the functionality using cck, views, and rules.
Now where you do need the custom module is in order to have the users reply to the ad without giving the ad poster email address.
All you need is a small modules that modified the node display for the content type and creates a form at the bottom.
You create a submit function for the form that takes the poster user id, the responder users id, and the message. Once you have the well you can do all the logic to figure out the posters email address and email him with the response and the appropriate user or email address to reply to.
I've did this not that long ago. I had a couple of more requirements but the idea is the same.
Hope this helps.
Eric
Anti,All of the features
Anti,
All of the features you've described are now pretty much on the roadmap for Classified Ads. Anonymous users should be able to post ads right now just be setting the permission. Moderation can probably be done right away with modr8.
I've picked up the module recently and am presently working on completing the port to D6 and getting a stable release. I'd like to then start adding these sorts of features (or at least describing in the handbook how you can get those features through specific combinations of other modules - there seems to be a module for just about everything with Drupal). At present rate of progress I'd see this taking place over July/August this year.
If you find someone to do the work for you in the meantime do ask them to supply patches. :-) Ericduran - I'm interested in any code snippets you want to offer regarding anonymous user contact.
Cheers,
Miles
Miles Gillham
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http://www.rideastride.com
CCK
I remember looking at the classifieds module a very long time ago and reading about the maintainer's decision to not use CCK and Views but rather do his own thing. For that reason, I decided not to use it. Now that the module is under new management, I'm taking another look at it. I'm wondering if you have any plans to bring it more into line with the trend of using CCK/Views to build solutions rather than modules that use custom coded fields and queries?
Thanks,
Michelle
---
I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)
CCK/Views
Absolutely - out of the box CCK, views, and all things drupal. I think the module was already starting to head that way. (I have to give Michael an awful lot of credit for creating this module - it's got very good bones and a huge potential. Unfortunate that he couldn't put any more time into it.).
My vision for Classified Ads is simply that this module provides a classified ad solution that deeply integrates with a site and the supporting modules that Drupal offers.
For a site I mean that a webmaster owner can activate the module and pretty quickly have integration with their site taxonomies, media, content (info, forums, events, stock, etc.), and value-add like geotargetting (zip codes, locations), contact & payment mechanisms, ad browsing/searching, bulk ad upload/management, ad mechanisms (display duration, audience, even auctions). Being able to recreate a craigslist is one measure but not the only one. It is not going to become an e-commerce solution (ie for a site owner to sell things, that's already out there), nor a banner management system (there are plenty of those). What it will enable is for a site to allow users to engage in efficient buy/sell of products and services while leveraging from the site content and infrastructure. In the case of craigslist, that is pretty much the site. Other sites have rich content of their own to add value to the whole process, depending upon whether classified ads is a bonus freebie afterthought or actually fundamental to the site's business model.
As I'm indicating with Drupal integration, the Classified Ads module needs to work well with other modules. That doesn't mean having a lot of module dependencies, but it does mean it needs to support the core Drupal APIs and detect and support APIs if other useful modules are present. There needs to be more documentation in the handbook to give HOW-TOs for that purpose, and testing with those modules. Largely I expect those to be along the lines of "make sure you install module xxx, and yyy and Classified Ads will pick them up" (eg for image galleries, or zip codes), adding some Views boilerplates, and some more configurable blocks to drop into your content. Adding your own CCK fields should just automatically light up ad listings, previews, related items, etc.
A good ultimate test will be "can you make your site into a craigslist or eBay with this module and some extra plug-ins and will be it robust enough to support commercial-scale transaction volumes while just as easy to manage as if there are only 5 ads on the whole site".
Now there still needs to be some internal house-keeping fields but only to support deep integration with Drupal and out-of-the-box immersion with any web site. I'd like to have the key features described above implemented within the next couple of months. I've only been maintainer for 5 days now and progress is good. We need to get the 6.x port rock solid as a base before getting distracted with the new features and that alone is going to take a couple more weeks. There's a good community out there using this module and I'm leveraging quite a bit off the talent and good will right now and would like to keep that going.
Cheers,
Miles
Miles Gillham
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http://www.rideastride.com
Awesome!
It sounds to me like you have a solid plan for the module and a good one at that. "next couple months" is a good timeline for me. My site that I want to use this on got put on hold while I jumped on the DruBB project so it's going to be a while before I can get to it. I'm looking forward to having a look around that time to see what you've come up with.
Thanks for taking it on!
Michelle
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I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)
Classified Ads
"It is not going to become an e-commerce solution". I am rooting for the classified ads module. It is one of the missing modules to make Drupal complete. However, please do give consideration to possible integration with e-commerce or Ubercart as the simplest ways to accept payments for ads. At the end of the day it would be really nice to make a penny whilst being good to the community. Thanks for the hard work.
Classified Ads vs e-commerce
Great feedback and good point. I should clarify what I mean be "e-commerce" (it's grown to mean a lot of things over time). I was intending that Classified Ads would stay pure to a peer-to-peer sales model where a site owner can take payment for the service either through: passively (banner ads or some other site service), by subscription (site users pay to have the ad service), and/or per transaction (ie placing each individual ad). So the "core business" of Classified Ads is to be really good at providing that service (with all the bells and whistles of moderation, contact mechanisms, various durations, auctions, dutch auctions, craigslist-style layout, etc. etc.).
The payment part I thought of as being more generic Drupal-ish in that I don't want to reinvent the wheel on payment gateways or shopping carts, but I would like to integrate it (ie play nicely) with existing modules. The three candidates always in my mind were e-commerce, Ubercart, and lm_paypal. Just a matter of interface and work flow.
In the present roadmap I want to get Classified Ads out of alpha (critical bug fixes, stability) and into beta (new core features) so that it starts being distinctive and fill that missing piece as you say. Somewhere towards the end of the beta cycle I'd see the payment integration pretty much sorted out so that by release candidate stage it's a full drop-in classified ads solution.
I'll revise that quote to be "...but will work with any Drupal e-commerce system.". :)
Regards,
Miles
Miles Gillham
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http://www.rideastride.com
It's great news that
It's great news that classified ad module will be live again with more features. Looking forward to see it equivalent to to a commercial solution for the same purpose.
Thanks!!
One feature I'd like to see
One feature I'd like to see is possible integration with the date API, so people could, depending on whether they have permission to set their own ad expiration times, click in a text field and select a date for ad expiration.
For http://stlouisreview.com/, we run a couple of ads that we have to reset the expiration on every week, since the companies bought the ads for a long time.
__________________
Life is like Drupal: At the end of the day, you wonder how everything's still running!
Also... would it be possible
Also... would it be possible to have a checkbox on an ad that allows it to be set to 'never expire'? This could be made so that only administrators (or those with a permission) could see the checkbox, but it would be a great help.
__________________
Life is like Drupal: At the end of the day, you wonder how everything's still running!
Expiry date control
I like these both! Have added them as project feature requests (#531736: User selectable expiry date, and #531738: Admin never expire override). They need to be evaluated at the same time as they have implications on the architecture of the approach. I like to add generalised functionality whereever possible.
I don't always remember to check this forum (slaps fingers) so feel free to just raise as a project issue as I watch those pretty regularly.
Cheers,
Miles
Miles Gillham
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http://www.rideastride.com
(No subject)
Miles Gillham
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http://www.rideastride.com
classified ads
Link to classified ads module http://drupal.org/project/ed_classified
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How to contribute to Drupal.
looking forward to see what
looking forward to see what happens. I'd love to see ubercate integration. I've started to use UC Node Checkout for a classified system but it isn't getting that much attention these days and the features are limited.