anyone familiar with phpbb's shop mod?

[Kristen]

If so... you know how you can view your inventory as images in posts, instead of just a "view inventory" link? How can you do that with smf's shop mod? We looked at the profile image mod and it wasn't the same thing..what we want is to be able to view all the inventory (which will be mostly little images) right there in the posts and not have to click on "view inventory" to see them kwim?

[mama_sarah]

meh I hope someone knows how to do this...I am kinda missing PHPBB at the moment.

[David]

This feature isn't part of the shop system at the moment (unless Daniel knows otherwise or is considering it for future versions) and, frankly, I'd advise against it. Images in posts like these will make page load speeds slower and also mean more database queries per page which will also make page load speeds slower...it's the sort of thing I'd want to turn off PDQ. Having it done the current way means that there is almost no page load speed impact.

 To have those little images I would expect that it would be necessary to have GD installed on the forum's server and to thus have it make the small icons on the fly...not every server has such facilities and so you'd have some forum owners with difficulties running the mod if it were to be required...for instance look at the SMF Gallery mod that uses GD and has frequent moans and groans from people whose servers don't support it.

 My feeling would be that phpBB does it the wrong way and though it looks fancy it's side effects make it less than desireable....just my opinion.

[mama_sarah]

actually it works really well for a site Kristen is from. It is not extremely slow or anything either. Well thanks David for your help. This sucks though. Having the images in posts makes it much more fun.

[Basil Beard]

My feeling would be that phpBB does it the wrong way and though it looks fancy it's side effects make it less than desireable....just my opinion.

Thats phpBB for you, isn't it?

Anyways, You could probably do it if you wanted to by looking at the stuff that displays posts. But sometimes inventories can get big. So you would want some sorta control so that pages are not streched.

[David]

Thats phpBB for you, isn't it?

 Too true...my first forums were all phpBB as that was on the Fantastico my then host provided...but...just look what I'm running most of my forums on now (still have to use ibP for one but that's a long story...).

 You just have to get a phpBB board hacked once to become a convert to the greater security we get from SMF...for me that was what made me make the move but having made it I don't regret it one little bit and don't miss phpBB at all.

[Daniel15]

If so... you know how you can view your inventory as images in posts, instead of just a "view inventory" link? How can you do that with smf's shop mod?

I never had time to work on anything like this, unfortunately (school just takes way too much time )
Just some questions for you:

• Would this be all items, or just a few?
• If just a few, which ones? Would they be for the in-built SMFShop items, or your own custom ones?
• How large would the images be?

Sorry about all the questions , I just want to know the best way of approaching this (if I get around to doing it )

[Lady Ambrosia]

If so... you know how you can view your inventory as images in posts, instead of just a "view inventory" link? How can you do that with smf's shop mod?

I never had time to work on anything like this, unfortunately (school just takes way too much time )
Just some questions for you:

• Would this be all items, or just a few?
• If just a few, which ones? Would they be for the in-built SMFShop items, or your own custom ones?
• How large would the images be?

Sorry about all the questions , I just want to know the best way of approaching this (if I get around to doing it )

Daniel I can probably answer those questions, since I've used phpBB, if I remember correctly this is how they have it:

• Only a few items are listed (and usually admin sets how many, you can have link to see the rest, or it can be omitted)
• The items are usually just image items (meaning they have no meaning kind of like the pet rock item, but members buy the items for other members for special occasions, just because, etc. Sometimes the member sending the gift can leave a message and when you hover your mouse over it, other members can read the message and who the gift is from)
• The images would probably be around 12 x 12 pixels or 16 x 16 pixels (any bigger and it would stretch the forum layout)

Yep, that's pretty much what I can remember of that shop item, it's fun and all, but can be a pain if the admin has the image listing set too high.

[Daniel15]

Anyone have some sample images I can use?
So, something similar to the "Profile Image" item, except multiple items, and each with a different image?

[Lady Ambrosia]

Yeppers, basically.  Um, I've seen most people use the images from this site:  http://mazeguy.net/smilies.html  He's got an AWESOME collection to use for little profile shop items.

Here's an example of what a profile looks like:


Of course this example has Support Ribbons too, but you get the basic idea

Although, to take the work load off of you Daniel, you can have the people who use this mod to download and use their own images

[perplexed]

I've seen someone talk about this before, I think in the smf member awards mod thread on smf, because these little images, if you hold the cursor over them, actually say what it is and who it was from, so they are all customisable IIRC

that little cursor rollover thingy doesnt happen in the member awards and I think someone wanted it to

[sjmarsha]

Yeppers, basically.  Um, I've seen most people use the images from this site:  http://mazeguy.net/smilies.html  He's got an AWESOME collection to use for little profile shop items.

Here's an example of what a profile looks like:


Of course this example has Support Ribbons too, but you get the basic idea

Although, to take the work load off of you Daniel, you can have the people who use this mod to download and use their own images

I would really love to have something like this for my site, so members could send tiny little icons as gifts to each other to be displayed in their profile. Maybe like the latest 10 in the profile with a link to where you could view all of them. I may even be willing to pay for a mod like that.

[Basil Beard]

So they way I would see this working would be to make some items "gallery items" which,  upon use, go into your "gallery" which is displayed by your posts. So like, once it goes in it cannot come out. It probably wouldn't be *that* hard to code.

I would accomplish this by have a new table called "shop_gallery" or something like that. It could contain a list of gallery item id's, group the gallery item belongs to, and pictures.

You would then have a new row in the members database that contains an array of all the gallery item ids which the member has.

The display code would then like sort the items by group and output the the result.

PHP does have a sort function on arrays, right? That would be the only major hook-up.

[Lady Ambrosia]

So they way I would see this working would be to make some items "gallery items" which,  upon use, go into your "gallery" which is displayed by your posts. So like, once it goes in it cannot come out. It probably wouldn't be *that* hard to code.

I would accomplish this by have a new table called "shop_gallery" or something like that. It could contain a list of gallery item id's, group the gallery item belongs to, and pictures.

You would then have a new row in the members database that contains an array of all the gallery item ids which the member has.

The display code would then like sort the items by group and output the the result.

PHP does have a sort function on arrays, right? That would be the only major hook-up.

Honestly you lost me on code talk, but I will say this much, most of the forums that I've seen that have this feature, ONLY have this feature.  They don't have all the cool stuff that the SMF Shop has, granted some forums have a lotto, jobs, and this image thingy, but they don't really have what SMFShop does, at least I don't think they do.  So, I'm pretty happy with how SMFShop is now, granted I love LOTS of the addons (specially the pet mod *wink*), but one reason I love SMFShop is that you can do more with it than others.

[perplexed]

reply 373 in member awards on smf here

this is the post I referred to above.  It links to this forum which is vbulletin, and if you look at the last two posts there, those people have the little images multiple times with different message on the mouseover, and more examples here.   These are gifts from the shop, but kinda the same thing you want to achieve here maybe? lol

Anyway I thought it looked kinda cool, but then they would need to be small and a display limit set.  Or maybe show the first 10,and link to the rest, or randomise the display.