add selected products to cart button

I'm considering setting up ZC as an intranet digital archive manager for a small publisher. Other systems I have looked at don't have anything like the support and modification possibilities that Zen Cart has.

All the "products" will be downloadable collections of digital assets for a particluar book. Categories will be something like: all books by catalog number, linked to: all books by title, all books by genre, new issues by month, etc. and each book will have multiple downloadable files applied using product attributes.

End users will want to download multiple (even hundreds) of titles at once to send to dealers for their own websites, and they will want to select many products at once.

How might I go about changing it so that the "add selected products to cart" button just adds all the products in a current category?

Any help would be great.

A.D.

Maybe there could be a way to add a "select all" button next to it?

...finally found some relevant posts on this subject.

I am currently just trying to make these mods in a test store version 1.3.9h. If I am successful, I will implement on an internal site for a team of sales/marketing and creative staff to be able to access digital assets by catalog number, or category and download selected items. I'm not in to failing.

I configured all my products to be virtual with a set number of downloadable attributes. (each one will have attribute A, B, C, and D) I have all my attributes set to display checked and all my products default to qty=1. First goal is to get the "add selected items to cart" button to turn back on.

First mod: adding attributes to product listing page
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98641

This mod adds the attributes from each product to it's listing on the products page. It allows me to activate the "add selected items to cart" button. Good, hope it actually works, I see some dubious looking qualifiers at the end of the thread, I will have to look into.

Now if I have all attributes appearing selected by default and all products have qty box=0 (so that all quantities default to 1), then when I press add all selected items to cart, they should all be in my cart. ...but alas, my cart is still empty.

Move on to this mod.

Sell Entire Category.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48123&highlight=add+entire+category+cart+click

Apparently, this has not been worked on yet.
Would it really be that complicated to have a "select all" button next to the "add selected items to cart" button? I'm not unfamiliar with php and I have learned other programming languages so I have due respect for how tough it can be to do some things that would otherwise seem simple. I am willing to give this a try. I just need to get my head around the big picture.

Reading through includes/modules/product_listing.php
and includes/classes/products.php
and includes/templates/default_templates/tpl_modules_product_listing.php

Will post anything I come up with. Maybe someday someone else will want to do this.

A.D.