AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hi everyone.
We are a small team based in the uk that really like the back end functionality that Ablecommerce appears to offer (the admin, payment, reports and affiliate stuff) but wish to use the front end in a different way. I appreciate this post is a bit vague but if any long time developers could answer it would be greatly appreciated.

To summarize, we wish to use the products system in a way that allows us to load one single product into a flash front end with the following elements:

- Base (front) product image
- Side image of product (custom code)
- Back image of product (custom code)

I would like to refer to these images as "views". The data would be loaded into the flash via XML and each "View" would contain custom nodes such as imageURL(strings), Dimensions (integers), Booleans etc.

We then wish to allow users to add text and images to these "views" and save the order (which can also be loaded back into the flash at a later date with their custom text and images). Depending on the if the user has added elements to a view we would need to charge different amounts of money. Ultimately, each order cost and elements would be entirely different and only the base product information would be the same for each one.

I appreciate that anything can be coded to fit such a task but i wondered how feasible you think this would be on the current codebase. Would it be worth our while to spend the time doing this or do you think this is too bespoke and warrants a new system? I am hoping that we can use it so that the work of payment and reporting etc are already in place.

Thank you very much for your time

Dave

I don't see any reason why you couldn't do this ... go to the reference posts forum and download the latest copy of the AbleCommerce 7 API.

You could use the existing "Product" objects to represent each of your products. You could then create new tables ... say "ProductDetail" tables (or something of the like) to house your custom data. When you go to dispay your product information, you can use the ProductDataSource to pull the relevant information and then you can load your own custom data with a custom coded ProductDetailDataSource or the like. You can then do with it as you will.

I've done heavy tweaking of the AC codebase (and I don't have the source). In fact, I don't really even use all that much of their display components ... it's a pretty good framework to work with.

Best of luck,
Mike

keats76 wrote:I don't see any reason why you couldn't do this ... go to the reference posts forum and download the latest copy of the AbleCommerce 7 API.

You could use the existing "Product" objects to represent each of your products. You could then create new tables ... say "ProductDetail" tables (or something of the like) to house your custom data. When you go to dispay your product information, you can use the ProductDataSource to pull the relevant information and then you can load your own custom data with a custom coded ProductDetailDataSource or the like. You can then do with it as you will.

I've done heavy tweaking of the AC codebase (and I don't have the source). In fact, I don't really even use all that much of their display components ... it's a pretty good framework to work with.

Best of luck,
Mike

Hi Mike.

This sounds like exactly what i need to do! I will go and take a peek at the API now.
Thank you very much for pointing me in what appears to be the exact direction of where i need to go!

Kindest regards,

Dave