A question on customizing checkout

[harley77]

I'm looking at the possibility of building a site that needs an eCommerce system. I'm very familiar with the catalog system so I figured isotope would be the best option for this project. The thing is, this is more of a service oriented product (weddings to be exact) that will be offered and needs some things not normally found in a standard ecommerce system. I see I can add variables for the products, which would be needed, but, I also need to have the ability to create custom fields that need to be filled out as a part of the checkout process. Things like wedding time/date, hotel, etc. This information would need to be sent and stored with the rest of the order information.

I'm doing some testing with Isotope and I don't see a way of adding these. Is this something I'm missing?

[winanscreative]

Hi Harley-

Out of the box you can create a form in the form manager and assign it to your checkout module as something that is displayed on the review screen. However, the system is also flexible enough to accommodate a custom checkout step, which sounds like it would be what you needed in this case.

I have done a few shops now where the products are "classes" or "services", and have done just that. It requires a little bit of programming knowledge, of course, but I am sure you could find a dev like the ever-so-talented Fred or Andreas to whip that up for you without much trouble at all.

[harley77]

Are there any resources that go over customizing the checkout? Mainly, what files/templates need attention? I've done fairly well handling the PHP needed for the catalog, so I can't see why I couldn't give this one a go.

[Rob65]

Hi Harley,

Best thing is to have a look at isotopeeCommerce.com. There you will Find all sources, documentation, tickets and a discussion board with more technical information about isotope. The "project manager signup" will grant you access to a lot of this information - it is not just for project managers.

I've only looked at the code for a few hours, it contains some comments (very useful if you read them well...). Naming conventions of files, functions and variables are fairly straight forward. PaymentPaypal.php is about ... And Checkout.php about ... :-)

There is already a way to include a form at checkout (order conditions form). I quickly checked and found that the submit button of that form will trigger the checkout - you just have to figure out how to link the information to your checkout; I have not looked at that part.

Rob

[winanscreative]

Hi Harley-

Rob is correct... Sign up for the Project Manager and get access to a lot of good info.

If you want an example of a custom checkout step I have posted one here for you to follow... Should make sense if you know what you are doing...

[harley77]

Thank you, I will be looking into the isotope forums.

It looks like the form addition during checkout could work, even if it is a stopgap until I get the custom checkout figured out. The only issue now is the form data isn't submitted, even when clicking the form submit button. The order seems to submit fine though. Not sure what the deal is there, but, if that can be worked out, then It may be what I need.

[Rob65]

Harley,

Did you also look at the sample code from winans (see above) ?
I created an isotope_custom_checkout directory in system/modules and placed the files from the zip in there. This adds an extra step in the checkout process.

And you can of course always add a custom text field or text area as product attribute to let the customer fill in the date or location. Don't forget to define this attribute as "defined by customer", otherwise it will not show up as a customer editable field.

I was just thinking: what if multiple customers order your service at the same date/venue?

Regards, Rob

[Ruud]

Hi Harley-

Rob is correct... Sign up for the Project Manager and get access to a lot of good info.

If you want an example of a custom checkout step I have posted one here for you to follow... Should make sense if you know what you are doing...

Good example! Using the example for my own extra checkout step...
One notice for anyone using the code; stripos may return 0 on success if the string is at the start. In the example it is only checked for equality. It should be compared to be identical to false stripos(...) !== false/stripos(...) === false.