by Dylan on Sat May 10, 2008 10:09 am
Wrote quite an extensive reply up to three times now, only to find out that the forum has logged me out by the time I hit submit... Grmmbl... will copy and paste in a minute.. I'll be right back
[edit] And yes I'm back.. here's some more specs/info
Hi Greyhead. Thanks for your reply. Yes, it is very loosely specified but I only need a "standard" domainchecker. For which I have found a workaround, but I am still open to suggestions/offers.
Domaincheck specs:
- works with all tld's. For now we will only sell European tld's and the major international one's (com, biz, etc)
- easily add and change whois servers
- preferably have the domaincheck WITHIN the Chronoforms form, so it is easily added to the e-mail results in ONE SINGLE email (along with the rest of the form of course)
- no popups, no AJAX
Current workaround:
- standalone whois script installed somewhere on the site.
- Joomla wrapper wraps the (external) standalone script
- By use of the ComponentIncluder mambot, the wrapped SA script is shown at the top of the Chronoforms form
- SA script uses post to get the value (domainname, new domain/move dmain) to the Chronoforms page
Rest of the form:
THe rest of the form we'll do ourselves. Basically this is pretty straightforward, just simple checkboxes, dropdown, textfields, bladibla
General purpose of the whole thing:
We intend to sell small Joomla-powered sites to small businesses. i.e. YOur local contractor, caterar, bar, etcetera. These people only need a few pages such as "home", "about us", "our products", "contact" and "route"...
We have a few demo-installations which simply consist of a predefined Joomla config, sample content and a predefined set of extensions and plugins. The customer chooses the package they want, choose the template they want and simply enter the text and upload pics for THEIR pages on our form. The result gets mailed to our admin who then simply takes the values they provided and inserts it into their newly ordered Joomla site.
As to installing Joomla itself. This is simply uploading all files from the demo-site to their newly ordered domain, changing a few params such as different DB name, paths and so.. Copy and paste whatever they have entered as text into their DB et voila: a new Joomla site is up and running.
Joomla might seem a bit 'heavy' for such simple relatively static sites, but it offers us plenty of flexibility. Our customers do not get backend access, but can edit the text and pics in the frontend. But.... if at any point in time they do require additional features then it is simply logging in to their Joomla and installing extension x or y.
All that can be automated will be automated. We will move to a dedicated server so we can run whatever scripts we want. The form results will in some cases simply be written to an attached sql file so that it reads in pseudo
INSERT INTO ('something', 'something', '[the content item intro text they have entered on our form', etcetera
Simply run the .sql file on a specific database - and we save time on manual installations or manually copy+paste... Which is exactly why we can do for an extremely low fee.
Naturally this is not intended for customers who do want their own backend access, customizations, extended support and training and so on... Simply for the local contractor, caterer and usch who only need the five or six pages...
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