I'm very much hoping this isn't a feature request for 4.8... I'll just explain my situation:
I'm making a fundraising auction site for a nonprofit arts center, and really all I want to do is add some attributes for the volunteers adding items to fill out in addition to the description, that is, have a field to enter the name of the person who donated the item, and another field for the estimated market value.
I thought it would be trivial to create my own product type based on the auction module and with an extra field or two, but it has not been!
I can see many reasons to add open-ended text fields in addition to one big block for "description" to products, so I hope someone has some experience or advice.
Thanks greatly,
ben melançon - Contact me - Amazing Things Arts Center
Comments
what problems?
What have your problems been so far? Ecommerce will save any data submitted from the product form, but getting it back out again in a nice way is harder.
I see 3 ways of doing it:
1) Copy a product module you like, edit the code, use it
2) Use a CCK node, but this might not work with the auction module
3) Use form_alter to add fields to the form and save it in your own way.
Maybe if you give us more info we could help you more....
The hosting module does
The hosting module does that, but alas, it's in 4.6 only.
I thought I posted this follow-up to the list some days ago
Thanks, Sym. I simply can't find a product that has text-field attributes like I am describing. And I've found a few threads on drupal.org where similar queries have gone unanswered. If you can refer me to a product that has a text field in which the poster can enter any short text (that is, not a drop-down list of predefined choices), I am sure I can figure out how to do the same for an auction product. I guess I might as well figure out how the SKU is implemented and duplicate that, except that the SKU is implemented more deeply in product itself, and I was hoping to find a model that provides an extra field in, say, the level of tangible or an extension of tangible. Know of any?
Meantime I'll look into form_alter, but I'm not getting how to employ it yet.
Thanks again.
http://agaricdesign.com/ | http://zingspace.org/auction/
An aside about CCK...
I usually would recommend using CCK to solve this problem, as any node can be made a product. However from the sounds of it this does not seem to be possible due to the need for the auction module.
My aside to all of this is that for 4.8 maybe ecommerce should move towards becoming based on CCK widgets. There seems to be a lot of requests for product types that mix-and-match different pre-existing modules. Maybe if all of the different options were broken down to CCK fields people could create whatever they want.
I have transitioned collections of (non-ecommerce based) product nodes into sellable products. One of the frustrating things about this process was that the SKU and price were already inputted as flexinode fields but has to be re-inputted into the correct ecommerce fields. If all of ecommerce was based around CCK all you would have to do to convert pre-existing nodes would be to select what field should be the SKU and what number/currency field should be the price. Moreover, these fields could be reused in other content types and would be available to Views etc...
I'm not sure about how do-able something like this would be. Maybe Gordon or a core contributer can entertain my curiosity? I think something like this has the potential of simplifying ecommerce while opening up new doors.