Hi,

I would like to make a website similar in functionality to ConstantContent dot com, or iWriter, or a similar freelance site.

Main Functions Required:
Users can sign up either as a contractor or a client and create a profile.
The contractor uploads a digital product to the site, fills out a form with some details about their product, the product goes through an editorial review on the back end, it gets added to the database of available products for purchase, and the contractor automatically gets paid a commission when a client purchases their product.
Customers can preview the product before purchasing (with a graphic snapshot representing some of the text in the product, for instance).
Naturally, there's a mess of pages that would need to be included such as article topics for written content, and clients could select a category type and browse through the product previews for that category.
Clients can add special requests for items which are then broadcast to the community of contractors.

Hope I haven't forgotten anything huge; I've tried to be as clear as possible but I'm not a developer.

Is this possible to do with Drupal for someone who doesn't know code? Also, if you could recommend any plugins (modules? sorry, prior WP user) to achieve this, or just point me in the right direction generally, I would be much obliged. I was hoping not to hire a developer if there's any way I could figure out how to do it myself.

Thank you so much!

Comments

ar-jan’s picture

All of this seems possible with Drupal, but I don't know about the details of it all. You'll have to do a lot of research, since it's quite complex.

For signing up, you may want to let users select their role with a module like autoassignrole - so you can assign clients and contractors different permissions. If you want them to have profiles with different information, you could set up separate client and contractor profile types with profile2.

For the ecommerce part, I'd suggest looking into the commerce suite of modules. You could give contractors permission to create products, or perhaps use some other type of input and let the people reviewing create the product based on that input. You could use Drupal core content types and fields for this, or maybe something like entityform. For workflow management there are modules like workflow (I believe this only work with nodes).

Browsing products could easily be done using Drupal core taxonomy system (i.e. categories) and Views. I don't know how you'd best build something with special requests - no doubt it can be done, but how exactly this would be taken care of in Commerce... You could inquire in IRC #drupal-commerce, maybe someone there will have an idea.

I'm not sure if everything will be possible without writing code - you can certainly come very far, but it'll depend on the details of the requirements (especially for how it integrates with the commerce part). Good luck!

Sandip Choudhury’s picture

Yes, I have also same opinion like ar-jan. And you can also explore commerce distribution. There you can have all module bundle with, probably except autoassignrole.

Sandip Choudhury
http://hostingultraso.com

sprangm’s picture

Definitely follow ar-jan's advice on this. The most important thing you can do is specifically map out (or even write out) all the functions that you want your site to have. The next step will be to find modules that add in the functionality that you need. Sometimes there may be more than one, so it will be a matter of testing them out to see which one fits your situation best. This is especially true for complex commerce modules like Ubercart. Also, Drupal can sometimes have a high learning curve, so look up some tutorials to get yourself oriented before you dive in.