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I am wondering if anyone is interested in having a look at this project.

We are setting up an online Virtuemart store where we want to have shipping quotes. We have a commercial UPS quote plugin that functions well, but we also want to have another calculator from another freight company. They have provided us with their API credentials and we need to create a plugin that does the following:

Ship From
Joomla Virtuemart Vendor Location

Ship To
Joomla Virtuemart Shopper Location

Dimensions/Weight
Virtuemart

Misc criteria:
Saturday delivery, # of packages, surcharges, etc.

All of this is sent as an API request to our shipper and a quote is returned.

Question 1 Is Chronoforms or Chronoconnectivity an appropriate tool for this?

Question 2 How much would it cost to deliver this?

Looks forward to your feedback

Hi Metabern,

You can do this in a Chronoform but you will need to get the correct info from the VM tables and communicate with the freight company using curl.

#2- I'm not sure, you will need someone with VM experience, we are planning to release a new shopping extension soon but no release date is specified yet.

Best regards

Hi Metabern,

I'm a specialist in both VirtueMart and ChronoForms (all versions of both extensions).

As you probably know, VirtueMart provides support for shipping charges in the form of shipment method plugins. Like payment method plugins, shipment method plugins evaluate selected characteristics of the contents of a customer's shopping cart during checkout, and they return shipment charges to the VM checkout page. You could potentially build a VM plugin with ChronoForms but there are two significant problems with that approach:

-- VM plugins do not have a user interface of their own, so a large part of CF's functionality is wasted in this context
-- The VM system provides framework support for VM plugins but CF does not take advantage of that support, so you would have to do a lot of reinventing of the wheel if you chose CF

In other words, CF is not the ideal solution for your problem.

A better approach is to produce a custom shipment method plugin using the Advanced Shipping by Rules plugin. This plugin allows you to add your own rules and charges for any number of new shipping methods and carriers to it, by writing your own custom code for the plugin to run.

I've done this for some of my clients. If you can provide links to the freight company's site and the technical documentation for their API, I can give you an estimate for the job.

Thanks,

Russell Searle
Psicom

Hi Russell, we already have Advanced Shipping by Rules plugin. We would be very interested if you could help us with some advanced configuration. I went to your site and emailed you. Thanks