Can Zen-cart work with other applications?

[zhenjie]

Hi all,

I'm developing a new website which allows users to create custom t-shirts. I have a custom design application in Flash/PHP were the users can design their own t-shirts. after they finish their shirts I want them to be able to save their designs and add their designs/order to Zen-Cart. The pricing depends on their designs and the types of clothing they choose.

Is it possible to link this application (http://www.inkstyle.com.au/custom/) with Zen-Cart?

i.e. Someone designs a shirt and the total comes to $29.95 in the design applications. Can I somehow add that $29.95 to a Zen-cart checkout?

[DrByte]

Since you didn't say just "flash", but instead said "Flash and PHP", I'm trying to figure out how much of your custom generator is PHP vs Flash. Are you using loadVars functions to have PHP run some queries and bring back some user data, etc? If so, then you could rework the attributes.php module to provide data to your Flash application so that it can build its selector components, and then when you're done, simply have flash send a POST request to the cart, effectively submitting all the attributes selections as if the customer had done their shopping via the traditional attributes-selection methods on the normal product-details page.

This would require that you configure all the selectable attributes within Zen Cart and simply use Flash as an interactive interface for choosing options and perhaps previewing the effects of choosing one option vs another, etc.

That would be the most effective/efficient way, since Zen Cart's infrastructure will manage everything related to the order.


You could instead just submit a 'custom product' purchase of a certain price, and use some other method to manage the order in terms of knowing what was purchased, etc. This would require significant coding to build the "custom" product and prevent the customer from changing the price unexpectedly, etc. You'd also have to manage what the customer selected, using some external means.