Customer Add Product HTML Manufacturer Comments

[starynightskyz]

Sorry for this long babble before you. I am just trying to make sense of where I am in this project and I want to make the right decision when it comes to correcting this problem. So any and all advise/sugestions are welcome. (problem described below)

 

For my site, I want customers to be able to add their products. I think it would be nice if they could sell them directly from my site. But I do not want to handle their orders. It would be nice to add a paypal button in each product info page that opens to a new window, directly to the sellers Paypal account. and not the shopping cart. Buyers should have direct communication with the seller I don't want to be a go between. However, it is not nessesary, if a buyer would like to purchase a product, he/she could always contact the seller and make arrangements.

 

In order for the customers to load their products. I have added customer add product CAP, all seems to work fine with that but for I can not upload products from the admin section. I have to load them from CAP, and then I can edit them in admin.

If I load a product in the admin section, It shows in the store, but it can't be found in the admin product area.

 

I have installed FCKeditor so that I could have html in the product listings, in order to add urls etc. The editor is not available to customers loading their products through CAP, which is fine with me, because everyone will be throwing in colours,huge fonts, and extra images, next thing you know none of the product_info pages will match. and eventually the whole site looks like checken scratch.

 

I have also added manufacturer box with popup to the right of the customers product info page. I like this contrib, when a customer looks at a product, if they want to know more about the artist. they click a link under the "artists" image on the right and a pop up window comes up, giving phone numbers, web link snail mail address, and lastly there is a place for the manufacturers comments, or bio.

 

Here's where the conundrum comes in.

 

I need for their to be additional information, in html (clickable links ) in the product listings. And it would be different for each customer who is loading products.

 

I could add contrib customer extra fields. But I don't know how to make the fields work in CAP when a customer is adding a New product. Also, if I put the fields in to request the information upon sign up, how would I get it to automaticly load for all that customers (manufacturers) product listings?

 

I could add the extra information after each product is loaded from the admin using the FCK editor, But knowing my lil checken head, this leaves a lot of room for error. It's more than likely that on more than one occasion I would put Bobs info, in Janes product listing, and that would be a problem. Not to mention to do it this way would be time consuming.

 

If there were a way, that I could make the Manufacturers comment box, HTML friendly. I could put the customers additional information just one time, and it would always be available with each of their product listings. But if I want to use paypal links, the paypal link would be in the pop up, not in the product page where it should be. So there's a drawback

 

 

So, I ask you, what would you do, if in the same situation?

 

KR,

Nancy C:D