I'd like to get an idea of how many people would be interested in a Joomla Printfection Module. My first goal is to have all your products pulled into your own website, but the actual ordering transfers over to Printfection. Any interest?

That would be great since I use joomla in many of my sites.

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Jt_moreno
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Yes, I for one would have an interest.

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Thanks for the feedback jimsz and jt_moreno, that makes two. Any others?

I am interested.

Just a thought, since this forum is not too active. You may want to post on podforyou

Well I was thinking of writing the script to pull information directly from your printfection store, whenever a potention customer was browsing your site. But there's a problem with the API in that the potential customer has to log into printfection in order for it to work. That doesn't work for me.

I find the API issue frustrating because NOBODY from Printfection seems to be monitoring these forums. NONE of my observations or postings have received ANY comments from printfection staff. I'm wondering if Printfection is going under, so I hesitate to continue developing a Joomla Module for Printfection if they aren't going to support their own community.

But assuming otherwise (back on the API logon requirement issue) I'm thinking workaround. My thought is now, to have some sort of restricted webpage that only the joomla admin can get to, which would run a script to grab all the sections, products, and product options and then cache them locally. Then build the store from the local cache. The benefit of this is speed, I was thinking of a cache eventually anyway. The detriment is that whenever you've updated your Printfection store you would then have to logon to your Joomla Site and manually update the cache.

Now here lies another problem but it's with Joomla not Printfection. Ideally you'd just want a "Grab Printfection Store" button on the module configuration page within Joomla, except this isn't supported. So the workaround for this was to create some sort of rights restricted page to run the "Grab Printfection Store" script.

Would these workarounds be a deal breaker for anyone?? I know it sounds a little complicated, but I'd do my best to well document them. Once it was all set up, it should be easy to maintain.

I think you might be on the wrong track with the API. The customer does not need to be logged in to anything.

If you create your application correctly, it should just be pulling items from your stores and display them as HTML. Then you just need to manage the add to cart process and then the ordering process.

Printfection does not require anything from the customer until they provide credit card details.

Here's a functioning example of creating custom products and allowing people to order them (no login required):

http://www.monsterfaces.com/

I'm happy to answer any specific questions about the api.

Cheers,

Gavin

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First off the example you posted I believe has little relevance to the Joomla Module that I've written. The point of my Module is to grab all your existing products from your Printfection store and display them as if natively within an outside Joomla website. So if your Printfection store is updated, those updates would automatically be represented in your outside joomla website.

And I don't see any way of using the API to do an SQL query without logging into a printfection account.

Perhaps there is a better place within the forum to continue this discussion?

I'd still like to write PF Joomla extensions. But I want to start small and work my way up. I've hit a roadblock for now (the authentication issue) and pointed out a couple of bugs with the API, and it doesn't appear that there is much attention spent by PF on the forums or API support.

A Joomla module for PF would help drive business to PF, so I'm a bit confused as to the lack of support and attention. I'm highly technical and don't need hand holding, just a couple of pointers would be nice.

Most external stores that use the API are all along the lines of create your own custom apparel right now. All I want to do is make a PF store, and have my Joomla site pull the items for display natively within the Joomla site.

Is the API basically being abandoned?

In reading through the forums, I notice two things. It's a very inactive forum. Don't know why. I've seen little to no evidence that anyone is making use of the API. I've looked into it and haven't figured out how I'd use it.

The thing I'd like to do is to be able to automatically delete all images in a folder, like a junk folder. That is, a folder where I move images I not longer use. Currently I have to delete them one at a time, as I understand it. But I'm not sure if this is easily done with the API.

Is anyone using the API? And as some have speculated, is Printfection still well alive and growing, or stagnant and dying?

I pick this project up (creating a PF joomla module), and put it down again as time demands. I just picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, and I'm working on recursively grabbing all the tshirts and displaying them on my joomla site. What I'm working toward right now is just grabbing all the t-shirts and displaying them in an array of ajax boxes where you have the available colors and styles displayed along side the shirt and when you select a color it changes the t-shirt color for that picture and the shirt style as well. Plus when you hover over or select the tshirt picture a bigger lightbox style box will pop up. But I'm still working on the recursive algorithm right now.

My big problem with the API is there is NO support from PF at all. Gavin used to be able to help but he's no longer with PF. Usually this doesn't bother me because I can pick things up on my own just fine. However I've noted a few issues with the API, which are either bugs, or I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. My suspicion is the previous.

It's a down economy and I understand PF cutting back but if I could get a little help from them I'd be happy to write some documentation and/or instructions or blog articles to help everyone else out.

My ultimate intention is to have a PF joomla module for sale fairly cheap, like say $20/year for a basic module, then a bit more for the more advanced module.

But regardless my development is going to be on Joomla 1.6 and up. I'm not planning on supporting 1.5 or previous. Because by the time I have something ready 1.6 should be quite well established by then.