License, product, and serial keys, oh my

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mradcliffe's picture

So in the last month two new licensing projects have been introduced on drupal.org as projects, UC Product Keys and Licensing. Previously, there were two ubercart-specific ones, UC Sell Serials and UC License Keys. Being shameless, I dove into uc_license_keys, and ended up rewriting it for Drupal 6 on my own (Oh hey, I can use the proper term for fork here ;-). So that's one more to the mix so far.

I haven't heard back from any of my collaboration attempts so I was just about to publish MY shame onto drupal.org as well. Depending on what the schema of licensing looks like it may be a good idea to use this as the basic module while providing ecommerce and ubercart functionality in other modules.

In any case, I'm making this topic for collaboration if it occurs. And discussion of the now plethora of license generation options available for those looking to implement this functionality.

Ecommerce offers the ability to add a field, so it is also an option, but no module exists to help it along yet (that I know of).

name 5.x 6.x 7.x API Views Sequences
uc_license_keys Yes Sorta No no no no
uc_product_keys No Yes No no no yes
licensing No No No yes yes no
uc_sell_serials No Yes No no no no
mradcliffe's uc_license_keys No Yes No Yes Yes No

Comments

@mradcliffe, thanks for

nicksanta's picture

@mradcliffe, thanks for getting the ball rolling on this!

A quick correction - licensing does not currently have views support.

Some background on licensing:
I did notice uc_product_keys when scoping modules for the project I'm currently working on. Unfortunately it wasn't going to work, as the client needed different node types (webforms especially) to be products - rendering ubercart useless. He also sells his software in his store front, which meant he needed the export feature to be able to do that.

It just didn't make sense to use a module that was intrinsically linked to an ecommerce suite for this use case. So i set about creating a licensing framework which provides basic functionality but provided APIs so i could build on it in the future.

The schema is fairly simple, and keeps each license a completely independent entity. The table has the following fields:

  • lid => Primary key
  • license => The actual license key
  • uid => user it is associated with (Although, i just realised this could be abstracted further to accept other entities such as orders / nodes etc... i'll make an issue in licensing's queue)
  • shelf => This is mainly for the export feature, to ensure a license key isn't distributed more than once and people are buying already registered keys

I've just created an alpha release, jump in and take a look http://drupal.org/project/licensing. It would infinitely better to have everyone working on a central module.

In a follow up, I've put a

nicksanta's picture

In a follow up, I've put a message on the project page addressing the issue of duplication.

Thanks for the fast response.

mradcliffe's picture

Thanks for the fast response. I kind of put it up here to stew a while.

I'll take a look at licensing as I think it's probably the best base platform to build off of.

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