Pay to Publish 2

Hello everybody,

seems that Drupal still lacks an out-of-the box solution to bill advertisers for publishing listings on a site, so i am actually challenging and puzzling to set up a recipe that could do the job.

Figuring out what Coupet asks on his previous post on point 1 ("Charge users for each listing they place or each node they publish") could be relatively easy and is the starting point to achieve what follows. But moreover, what i dream is to be able to set up the well-known standard workflow present in almost any respectable e-commerce site, where exist different "levels" of listings, each of them containing incremental informations and visibility in the site.

To make an example, imagine the classic 4 ROLE MEMBERSHIPS, each containing a section of additional information and some more on-site visibility than the lower one. So an hypothetic Roles memberships configuration could be the following:

• Basic: free. Teaser only (or very basic info)[*1].
• Silver: 5$. Full node (more info)[*2]. Main image [*3].
• Gold: 10$. Full node (more info). Main image. Unlimited images gallery [*4]. More visibility [*5].
• Platinum: 15$. All above. Text+image Ad on certain pages [*6]. Randomly featured on homepage [*7]. More visibility.

As no ready solution exists, i tryed figuring out couple of possible approaches to this on paper but still seems some quirks are missing, so any advice from someone with more experience than me would be greatly apreciated! ;)

So here is what i came up with to fill the gap:

Recipe 1: Free Teasers, Premium Full Nodes

Ingredients:

• CCK: essential to build the listing-type.
• Image_attach: - needs coding of per-type/per-role granular permissions - adds 1 main image attachment to allowed roles in proper listing-types (see *3)
• Upload_image: - needs coding of per-type granular permissions - adds unlimited images upload and gallery to allowed roles in proper listing-types. (see *4)
• Role_weight: let's you weight listings and any content by role of author (Platinum first, Gold second,..) (see *5)
• Views: essential to obtain *5, *6 and *7.
• Premium: ??? (*1, *2)

Missing ingredient: so far so good, but what could be used to prevent Basic advertisers from displaying full node view of their listing (*1)?

Possible solution: The Premium module allows priviledged users to access full nodes of a site. Anybody has an idea if this could be turned inside out to prevent authors to show full node views to visitors? Any comment or alternative/better/easier solution about this greatly apreciated!

Recipe 2: CCK Per-field Permissions

Ingredients: as for recipe 1, but

• CCK: Per-field permissions patch (*1, *2).
• Imagefield: *3, *4
• Role_weight: *5
• Views: *5, *6, *7

Notes: Image_attach and Upload_image are not necessary if per-field permissions find their way through CCK. Multiple permission-enabled istances of the imagefield could be used instead.

Missing ingredient: Bèr Kessels tryed coding a per-field permissions CCK patch, but seems this is a blind road. Fields cannot handle permissions because of the aggressive caching of CCK right at the origin and the very first time the node output is generated. And a solution to this would be inacceptable in terms of performance/maintainability.

Possible solution: can anyone see an alternative or workaround to this?

Recipe 3: Nested Additional Nodes

Ingredients: basically identical to recipe 2, but using Nodefamily module to add incremental information to a listing.

• Same as Recipe 2
• Nodefamily: ? (*1, *2)

Notes: this solution is tied to the still beta Nodefamily module, which allows to define a relation between all nodes of a certain content type created by the same author. The module also allows to restrict the number of creatable nodes of a content type per user.

Possible solution: use Nodefamily module (part of the Nodeprofile package to create "nestable" listings made of more nodes, each accessible only by a particular priviledged role.

Maybe the "best" solution is somewhere in between these lines, or maybe these are just far too complicated roads to follow, and as a non-coder i could be looking in the wrong direction.

Anyway, at the moment Drupal still lacks a solid and flexible system to enhance pay-to-publish listing sites, so maybe a unified solution to this is desirable. I know this post encompasses modules that exule from the e-commerce package, but i thought this was the right group where to start a discussion on the topic!

Thank you in advance for any comment or feedback you might give,

cheers,

Marco