Selling Courses: Online Access/Downloads/DVD's

[dcENS]

Hi there,

I searched the forum but wasn't able to find out exactly how to make this happen.

My client would like to sell several courses online using Zen Cart, with the following variations (here I'm using a 7-part course).

1. People purchase one of the 7 parts of the course for online access. This gives them access to view the video online, to download it, and to download the associated PDF for that section.

2. People purchase the entire 7-part series of the course for online access (view online, download, access to all PDF course materials)

3. People purchase the entire course on DVD and receive hard copy of written course materials.

I am having trouble wrapping my head around the first two options, esp. option 1. I am unsure how to sell access to online videos, downloads, and document downloads all at once.

I also don't understand how people could "bulk purchase the remaining parts of the course (option 2). But if this is an issue, I am confident that people can be easily directed towards buying the course segments individually.

Option 3 seems easy enough - it's just selling a standard zen cart product. I would like, if possible, to give people who buy the DVD and booklet access to the online materials as well.


This all seems somewhat complicated - is there anyone out there who can point me in the right direction?

Best Regards,
Daniel
ENS

[Absolute]

If it was my store, I would do the following thing:

Firstly, create a new cart_action, which adds all products within a category to the basket if they aren't already in there. This sounds harder than it is, and allows you to put all 7 parts of the course in one category, and then have an "Add To Cart" link on the category as well as the products.

Next, write a new custom page (show_course_content) which grants access to "hidden" files within your root directory. You will need to create a new database table, and attach files to a specific product. This links your pdfs and movies to specific course parts that your clients buy. On the order hisory page, you can then show the customer a list of all the courses they have bought, and after each show a list of files they can now view, using this table as a reference.

Finally, using the new page you created, "show_course_content", you run a database query to check that the current customer has purchased a specific product, and if they have, and therefore have access to the file, you can then read the file into a php variable, send teh correct header to the browser, and then either display the content of the read file as a new file, in the case of PDFs, or show the content within the Zen Cart template, as is teh case with .mov and .swf files.

Absolute