Basic Coupons with Drupal

Ok, it's not anything great yet, but I'm using Drupal to put together an Online Coupon section for my grassroots journalism sites.

Things I still want to do:

• Track how many times each are printed
• Choose two (or more) coupons that you want printed on 8.5x11...
• Attach to PayPal for automation
• Auto expiration of coupons
• Create an RSS feed for the coupons and use FeedAPI to slurp them onto other sites in our local network. (On the business side, this will hopefully let us get the coupons in front of more people...)

What I've Done so Far:

• Used CCK (with image field for the logo) to create a 'coupon' type
• Used Print to have a click here to print this button. (I'm thinking this will have to be customized, though, to get it to count the prints...Haven't looked too closely for another solution yet, though...) Messed with the CSS a little to give it a "coupon look" - both in the print.css file and the template css file.
• Used contemplate to control output of data onto the coupon. This had some limitations, though, and I ended up having to add some code to template.php to use a custom page.coupon.tpl.php file.
• Used Views to show the coupons (I used Taxonomy and exposed filters so there's a dropdown for coupon types. This could (read: should) be expanded to include expiration date and other filters...
• Used Location to tie the coupon to one or more locations

Again, this isn't anything great (yet!), but I want to share the process and get feedback ideas as I grow the idea over the next couple months.

Any comments/thoughts/questions greatly appreciated.

Long live Drupal.

K. Paul Mallasch - Publisher
http://www.kpaulmedia.com

p.s. I am available for hire at $40/hour...