VirtueMart Forum

VirtueMart 2 + 3 + 4 => General Questions => Topic started by: mbardi on October 20, 2011, 13:26:32 PM

Title: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: mbardi on October 20, 2011, 13:26:32 PM
Hello,
I was wondering if VM 1.98i supports Digital Product Downloads like PDFs, ZIP Files, Audio & Video etc? It looks like it was supported in the 1.1x codebase.

http://thecutestsiteontheblock.com/virtuemart-tutorials/220-virtuemart-setting-up-downloads-to-be-purchased-as-products.html

If not can someone perhaps offer some guidelines as to how go about adding that support to the 1.9x codebase and I may be able have that featured added.

The same question was asked here about a year ago with no answer, hopefully things have progressed a bit since then.

http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=91652.msg301036#msg301036

Thank-you,

Mark
Environment: VM 1.98i, Jooma 1.7.2
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: dsmith on October 20, 2011, 22:38:11 PM
Are you writing from the future?  That post you referred "from a year ago" was posted 10/5/11, just a few days ago.

Unfortunately, I'm REALLY looking for the digital products download feature too.. it sounds like there's going to be a plugin that will give this functionality, but it's still under development.  I know VM2 is just a beta RC release, but nevertheless, it's really lacking in some very important key features.  It's been nothing but headache after headache working with it. 
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: mbardi on October 21, 2011, 00:24:48 AM
ha ha, sorry I must have misread the date on that article.

Well the way OpenCart does it is they have a downloads section under categories in their backend admin. You just go through and upload all your digital products that are available as downloads and give them a name, title  or id. Then in you product pages you just add a number of download ids to link your digital product with a bunch of downloadable items. In the order confirmation email a link to the downloadable products or the User's Profile Page is included. The public link to the download locations are encoded with a key of some kind so the general public can't just hot link to the products themselves. It would require authentication - the user to be logged in for example. Then in the admin backend there is also an option to determine when the user is allowed to download the products and how many times - e.g. Sale status of Pending or Complete, 5 downloads total.

The other thing that is nice with OpenCart is that in the User profile section they provide the user with a history of all their order transactions as well as a page that shows all the downloads they have purchased and can re-download by a number of times that is configured in the product download item's config. e.g 5 times total, then they're grayed out.

I don't think it would be a big task to pull this all together if it hasn't been done so already. The code to upload images/thumbnails could easily be reused and we would just need to add or modify an existing controller, model and view.
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: Milbo on October 21, 2011, 19:19:01 PM
Our plugin is almost working that way.

you use medias and attache them to a product with the custumfields. The plugin is already roughly written, but not tested.
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: nordmograph on October 31, 2011, 18:05:38 PM
Hello

I'd be glad and interested in testing this file field vmcustom plugin for downloadable goods if it helps. :)
Will it be part of the VM2 package?
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: CranialBlaze on October 31, 2011, 20:19:52 PM
Count me in for testing.

Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: theorydesign on November 10, 2011, 15:29:24 PM
Hello, I was wondering what the progress is on this feature/plugin for the downloadable products? Thanks :)
Title: Re: VM2 and Digital Product Downloads?
Post by: Rolling Spider on November 10, 2011, 20:44:07 PM
Will it be possible/ included to add External links / URLs to the Downloadable Products Plug in