[snorocket]

thanks, but now it sucks because I already refunded those who did send money...hmmm, well I'll re-open the Addon for development and move forward, I'll be finalizing the exact design, how it will be programmed with the development team, yes we do plan on using flash however we have to consider the cost of doing it in flash and what other alternatives exist, we've collected a little over $400+ as of right now, I can post a detailed report if people like but from experience of the last mods people did'nt want there info posted ect...

[snorocket]

Dear Snorocket,

Can you develop this Addon in flash as shown in examples?

Yes we can develop such addon. Approximately the modification of such complexity will cost from $1500 to $3500 depending on what you will need.

Please let me know if it works for you.

Thank you.

---
Sincerely yours,
Oleg Gorshkov
Quote manager
https://www.cs-cart.com

ridiculous price tag folks, so what do you guys want to do?

[salukicentral]

$1500 between us is fair. The $2k spread to $3500 is scary though.

Mikael Harbo @ harboarts.com had told me previously that he would be interested in integrating his designer into CS. He charges 50 EUR and hour for development and his designer "as-is' is $1250 US or somewhere around that.

Might be at least worth an email to him to see what he thinks. That is, if his product as it is is even what everyone else is looking for.

If CS team can keep it towards the lower end of the quote, we'd probably have a product more in line with what we really want than taking something already done and try modifying it. I'm not a programmer, so my opinion might not be valid...

Aaron

[truem]

yep if they can keep it in the lower end i can go forward


also this mod can generate a lot of money if cs cart were to sell it, their aren't any good solutions as of right now for online designers(that are not monthly),all they have to do is go on any tshirt form and put up a demo

[snorocket]

I like the harbo example as well and that would work perfect, however I just don't see how it would be able to be integrated into cs without completely re-working the application from the ground up, plus it's 1,359.51 USD and almost $75/hr for custom work. Harbo doesn't know anything about CS and how it works so I believe CS could do it cheaper and we'd get the source code for the flash. I really hate to volunteer, but I could at least code maybe about 50% of the addon, the easy stuff like adding images, categories ect...but then we could have cs to finish it off with flash, lots of questions to answer first...

1. do we upload our own product images, clipart, patterns via the product designer addon or do we pull images from the actual products in the cart? I say we upload our own product images via the product designer because we may want to upload different pictures in the designer then we would want show on the cart products, if that makes any sense at all...example, if you upload a t-shirt you may want to upload the front, back, left and right sides, these 4 images would then be arrayed onto the customer front-end to be pulled off the product palette and placed on the design board, plus I believe it would be easier to upgrade the products designer addon into a newer version of cs in the future if the addon it kept as a stand alone package and not dependant on other aspects of the cart...

2. to what degree do we want this addon integrated into the cart? example: we could make it in such a way that after a customer is done designing they can add the design to their wishlist, come back later and finish it off, send to friend, save and download, print or purchase online ect...

3. we need input from you guys, can you tell me how you intend the Addon to work on your site, example, for your t-shirts or mugs do you envision having several categories of clip art (animals, flowers ect...) that customers can browse and choose from? ability to change the color of the clipart?

[truem]

3. we need input from you guys, can you tell me how you intend the Addon to work on your site, example, for your t-shirts or mugs do you envision having several categories of clip art (animals, flowers ect...) that customers can browse and choose from? ability to change the color of the clipart?

yes I have around 12 categories right now, changing the color of the clip would be good, i am guessing we would have to upload gifs in order to do this


just though of something will the cart allow the customer to change the item color? we carry each item in like 10 colors
like a tshirt can be blue or black ect...

[snorocket]

we carry each item in like 10 colors
like a tshirt can be blue or black ect...

yea but I'm assuming the way it would work is that if you have 10 colored t-shirts that you will have to upload 10 images of every color t-shirt, the customer will be able to change colors on the front end but those colors will probably be the colors of the fonts, cliparts ect...

[clips]

I believe it is very important to allow folks to upload their own image. There are settings that can be installed to tell folks they are using a "low resolution" image.

At our current desinger it just simply tells the customer it is low resolution. Other designers have a setting that tells the customer it is too low and tells them to please choose another image.

Thanks,
Clips

[clips]

Comments on integrating with CS-Cart...

integrated into the cart? example: we could make it in such a way that after a customer is done designing they can add the design to their wishlist, come back later and finish it off, send to friend, save and download, print or purchase online ect...

My experience in having a designer has been the following in regards to question above.
1) Add to wishlist - I don't believe this is needed. The main thing you want them to do is like what they have made and add it to the cart and buy it.
2) Come back later - Usually some type of cookies are left on a users computer so they can come back, but you would not want to make it too long. The easiest way to make this work is to make it to where the user can save what they have designed to their account. Then they can come back later and reorder the same thing or finish something. Otherwise cookies usually expire in a few hours.
3) Send it to a friend - I really don't see this as being important. While it may be cool if folks could make a "greeting card" type email, most probably would not. It seems like it would be a lot of work that may not payoff.
4) Save and download - I agree with the save, but I would not want them to be able to download it...unless it was very low resolution. I think the idea is for folks to order your product, but print something out for themselves.
5) Print or purchase - While a little image of the design in the shopping cart would be nice, the main thing would be to make a simple script that "adds" this item to the shopping cart and allow for the customer to check out.

We previously had a designer that was integrated with our shopping cart and it was excellent. Customers would shop for the custom items plus other items we offered. About 2 years ago we switched to a site ( YourPhotoPlayingCards.com) that had more custom items but did not offer our other related product. Our sales for the non-custom product dropped drastically. Not to mention the new site was more generic and did not offer as many bells and whilstles.

Thanks,
Clips

[clips]

$1500 between us is fair. The $2k spread to $3500 is scary though.

Mikael Harbo @ harboarts.com had told me previously that he would be interested in integrating his designer into CS. He charges 50 EUR and hour for development and his designer "as-is' is $1250 US or somewhere around that.

Might be at least worth an email to him to see what he thinks. That is, if his product as it is is even what everyone else is looking for.

If CS team can keep it towards the lower end of the quote, we'd probably have a product more in line with what we really want than taking something already done and try modifying it. I'm not a programmer, so my opinion might not be valid...

Aaron

We have also spoken with harborarts. Although their designer is pretty nice, I doubt that they will take their name off their designer without wanting to charge another $1840 (which is what they told us).

Since we all use an open source cart that we usually remove "maker" information, I'm not so sure we would want a closed source product.

Thanks,
Clips

[snorocket]

we're not even close to meeting the goal, please no more donations...

[snorocket]

we've had more interest in the Product Designer Addon, anyone still interested and willing to donate towards this exclusive addon should let us know, it would be nice to have a few more people on board with this addon to reduce the overall costs to everyone, Thanks - Sno

This is the deal, the Product Designer Addon will enable a customer to design their product online, upload a logo onto a product, the product can be a t-shirt, mug, engraving products, embroidery ect...however I'm expecting that a customer will still have to submit a high resolution vector file in addition to whatever they design online, I think the online product designer is going to be for reference purposes only, what are you guys thinking? I just don't think a customer is going to be able to upload a cheesy low resolution file and expect to get a quality product without providing a high quality proof, what do you think?

[jagorny]

What seems ideal to me would essentially work out a plug-in that would allow people to send designs created in an online editing system like aviary.com -

For example, on my Aviary account I use Raven to design a vector image and export it as an SVG... but be able to work out the design in Raven and then send it over to CS-Cart and simply have it show me a preview thumbnail of the image so that I can confirm.

I'm guessing there's a good SVG library out there for PHP? Haven't really looked...

Just throwing that out there - you can import SVG into Raven as well...

[snorocket]

after several hours I think we need something simple like http://www.cafepress.com but with a few extra features for image editing, editing features like text size, fonts, colors, object size, rotation ect...

[2020]

Here's a design tool with a clipart library, uploads, fonts, arced text, layers, imprint locations - all done with PHP and javascript. Only lacking element for my needs is support for lineart files.

http://www.customoutfitters.com

Seems to have been an inhouse development effort.

[clips]

Here's a design tool with a clipart library, uploads, fonts, arced text, layers, imprint locations - all done with PHP and javascript. Only lacking element for my needs is support for lineart files.

http://www.customoutfitters.com

Seems to have been an inhouse development effort.

Wow, this is a pretty nice program. Loads pretty fast too.

[CutRiteFX]

Anyone still interested in this. I am

[clips]

Yep, we're still interested. I just don't think there is enough interest overall in the CS community to get it done.

[snorocket]

I'm willing to give this another shot but we need huge donations towards the development costs, I can't remember the exact project costs off the top of my head right now but it was more then several thousand dollars, meaning we would need at least~300-400/ea. and $400-600 would be better, if you guys are still serious I can put the donation link up on the new snorocket site - Sno

[CutRiteFX]

Does anyone know another alternative? What Sno is suggesting is good but to get that many people to donate 300-600 each I think would take forever considering how far this thread goes back.

We are currently selling vinyl graphics and have started adding shirts to our site but would like some type of design tool for the users.