How to make specific items visible only to special customers?

I'm sure that it's been asked before but I could not find the answer after a few hours of searching these forums. I have some items in my store that I only want a few customers to be able to see. What option am I supposed to use to accomplish this?

How are you determining who these customers are and how are you going to tell them where the items are?

darthjones:

I'm sure that it's been asked before but I could not find the answer after a few hours of searching these forums. I have some items in my store that I only want a few customers to be able to see. What option am I supposed to use to accomplish this?

You can only do it if you can get the customer to login first otherwise you won't know who it is.

If you do know who your customer is, you can modify anything so you get any particular product to display. The better you can get the rules, the easier the sql query and the easier the mod.

Hmmm.... as has been pointed out, you would have to wait for them to log in ...
you could always customize categories.php in includes/modules/sideboxes and
prune out things you didn't want shown to the hoi polloi. If you wanted to go
further, you could customize product_info in includes/templates/template_default/templates
to be sure the user was "authorized" to see the product.

If you do go this route, be sure to include some text in the description to indicate
the exclusivity of the offering. People love that stuff. :)

Good luck,
Scott

swguy:

Hmmm.... as has been pointed out, you would have to wait for them to log in ...
you could always customize categories.php in includes/modules/sideboxes and
prune out things you didn't want shown to the hoi polloi. If you wanted to go
further, you could customize product_info in includes/templates/template_default/templates
to be sure the user was "authorized" to see the product.

If you do go this route, be sure to include some text in the description to indicate
the exclusivity of the offering. People love that stuff. :)

Good luck,
Scott

Thanks for the tip. Most of the people that I want to do this for are returning customers that have been around for a little while so they will already have an account. What should I do to the user account to indicate that he/she is "authorized" should I use your second suggestion?

Change the customers table. Then in whatever things you wanted to change (start with the categories sidebox, I would say, assuming you can put all these products in one category), check to be sure that the "privileged customer" flag is set (from that customer's table). If you can't put them all in one category, you'd have to prune the results or perhaps just make "privileged" products appear sold out.

Good luck,
Scott

Can you be a little more specific on how to change the customers table?

Challenge: I have a customers group that will have special products...so I'd be very interested in learning more about how to create the special products and "flag" those customers that can see the products.

I was able to add a new column to the customer table pretty easily. I'm fairly good with PHP but I don't know which file I'm supposed to edit to make it so that only "privaledged" people can see a certain category. I need to know where to place an edit so that specific categories cannot be seen during regular browsing AND after a search. Any hints would be appreciated.

Thanks!

EVERYwhere you see a SQL statement related to products_status or categories_status ... will have to be changed to incorporate your security logic.
Approx 90 places in 45 files.
And then you'll have to review all the other selects to determine if there are any others that should be checking status but don't currently do so.

And then there's the admin side...

I guess I can live without this for a little while. Are there any plans to incorporate an option like this in future revisions?

darthjones:

I guess I can live without this for a little while. Are there any plans to incorporate an option like this in future revisions?
Features like these demands heavy changes in the database columns and queries getting called in the program
I am sure this is not easy to implment