bending squirrel cart

[astage]

Sorry, I sent these questions in email also, before I spied the link to this forum.
My client, a continuing education school, needs to be able to register students for classes. The number of classes is relativley small, apx 50 in 3 different catagorys.
the only deliverable is a receipt for registration, so shipping options need to be disabled
I would like to have the quanity field be a hidden default of 1, preferrably 1 would be the only legal quanity, as you wouldnt want to register for a class twice.
I would also like to prevent any class(item) from being added in another action, by not allowing any duplicates in the cart during any 1 session.
Are session expirations configuable? I would like a prospective student to be able to save an incomplete registration, and be able to return to it.
what mechinism prevents duplicate account creation?
The only product per say would be a request for a free brochure, and I would like to be able to download these customer records into their desktop DB app, as they do alot of direct mail. Did i read somewhere that I can access the tables directly with phpMyAdmin and export a CVS file?
How many records can the email admin tool handle
Can I bulk load a text file into the products table to set up the store, so I dont have to add 1 at a time.
Is the admin area configurable, i would like to only display options that are useful to my client.
I guess my main question is can the squirrel would as a registration system? If not can you reccomend anything else. I really dont relish having to code the application from scratch

[Jamie]

Hi,

Thanks for posting. You would need to make some minor changes, and a couple major ones as well to get that to work. I'll elaborate below.

shipping options need to be disabled
That is doable. See this post: http://www.ldev.com/forums/showthread.php?t=783

I would like to have the quanity field be a hidden default of 1, preferrably 1 would be the only legal quanity, as you wouldnt want to register for a class twice.
You can modify the show_product_detail.php template file to hide the quantity field, by changing it's type property from "text" to "hidden". It would default to 1. You would also need to hide the qty field at checkout, so they can't alter the qty there. This would work well, because they could still click "remove" to take it out of the cart.

I would also like to prevent any class(item) from being added in another action, by not allowing any duplicates in the cart during any 1 session.
There is no easy way to keep a customer from going back to the product page and adding it to the cart again, which would increase the quantity. You could accomplish that with some custom code.

Are session expirations configuable? I would like a prospective student to be able to save an incomplete registration, and be able to return to it.
There is no support for that, and there is no easy way to implement it. Again, it would require some custom PHP code.

what mechinism prevents duplicate account creation?

You cannot create an account with the same username or email address as an existing account.

Did i read somewhere that I can access the tables directly with phpMyAdmin and export a CVS file?
Yes, you can use phpMyAdmin to export data.

Did i read somewhere that I can access the tables directly with phpMyAdmin and export a CVS file?
It is designed to email all the accounts that are selected on the page. It can handle emailing all the selected accounts on the page. It is not setup to email every account in the database. I am not sure why we didn't add that. That could be done with some custom code as well.

Can I bulk load a text file into the products table to set up the store, so I dont have to add 1 at a time.
Yes, you can import into the database using phpMyAdmin. We will be adding an import feature in the future to make this easier.

Is the admin area configurable, i would like to only display options that are useful to my client.
Customizing the admin section is not supported. We can give you tips on hiding certain fields from the table views, but we couldn't assist beyond that.

I guess my main question is can the squirrel would as a registration system? If not can you reccomend anything else.
It certainly can be done, but would require a good amount of work. I don't know of any registration systems off hand. I would suggest you search Hotscripts.com and php.resourceindex.com to see if anything would suit your purposes better.

Should you decide to go with Squirrelcart for this, and need a quote for custom work, please let us know.

Thanks,
Jamie

[Rich]

bending squirrel cartJamie forgot to mention that you shouldn't bend the Squirrels. :scared:

They don't like it very much and they could get injured. :squirrel: