How to populate a set?

Greetings,

I am very new to ZC and before I invest a huge amount of time in learning to use it (including buying the guide), I need to know if the following is possible:

I want to sell sets of notecards, 4 cards and envelopes per set.
I would like customers to be able to make up their own set from about 40 cards I have in stock. They would select 4 different cards (or perhaps more than 1 of a particular card) to make up the set of 4 that would be sold for price/set.

If this can be done in ZC, I would be grateful if you would point me to the appropriate function/module to use.

Thanks,

Wayne Gustafson
http:// entospress . com

Without knowing a little more about exactly how you see this working, I'd guess you could do that using attributes and adding this mod:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=876

Attributes would be an effective way of doing what you are after... BUT... you would need a bit of javascript to STOP the user from adding more than FOUR attributes out of the FORTY that you will display.

It can be done... but it is a bit finicky. We did this on a site where users could select up to THREE colours for a custom garment, out of a list of TWELVE colours in total. They could select any combination... but from the 12 on show, only THREE could be chosen in total.

You would set up your product(s) essentially as "generic" sets - possibly by theme.

Then, each "card variation" would be described as an attribute checkbox, with an associated attribute image (a pic of the card in question). Alongside each image would be a checkbox.

When the customer has chosen the 4 variations they like, the javascript stops them from checking more checkboxes, and they then add the "product" to the cart.

I seem to remember that when we did this on our site, DrByte gave us a bit of advice. I could look up just how we did this in my notes, but as we have built over 200 sites this could take a while !

But YES... zencart CAN do what you want... you just need to limit the selections to 4 variants - and a bit of JS can do this.

There is NO standard "module" for this as it is a unique bit of behaviour that you want just for your site.

It is also HIGHLY UNLIKELY that any other opensource software will have this as a "standard" feature.

I thought I responded to all this help on Friday, but I don't find it anywhere, so let me say again:

I am deeply appreciative of the quick responses from stevesh and schoolboy. Now that I know zen cart can work for my needs, I will bet about the business of learning how to use it properly. Thanks the the encouragement.