I’m working on a travel site and am interested in adding some functionality so that visitors can easily click on a travel destination and add it in a “bag”, pretty much like a shopping cart on traditional e-commerce websites. When a few destinations are added the customer should be able to type their own text along with the picked destinations and then send an offer by clicking a button.
A travel guide will then receive the form data to customize a trip for the potential customer.
Every destination in Joomla has its own article and therefore need some sort of button that the user can click to add trip to the “bag”. If this functionality is inserted in the article by some piece of code or if it’s a module in the sidebar doesn’t really matter.
I have tried using “SimpleCaddy” for Joomla. I have modified it but I find it really hard to turn it into something useful.
I would like to know how to best proceed? Are there perhaps any extensions, (commercial or non-commercial doesn’t matter), that can get the job done?
Most definitley there are. You tagged you’re using joomla 1.5, Virtuemart is a great e-commerce solution for that version. Hugely popular, well supported, large community extremely customizable… the downside is that it can be very complex if you’re not sure what’s going on. Simple Caddy is a great one for something really lightweight and easy to get up and running quickly – but it lacks any sort of advanced features.
Unfortunately in my experience finding one that blends between ‘lightweight and easy’, and ‘full featured and complex’ is very difficult. you may also want to try JoomShopping however – I’ve recently installed it on a site and had great success with it. It was really straight forward, setup was not too bad and getting it configured just took a bit of trial and error (unfortunately there are no real good tool-tips or anything to help you figure out exactly what does what on the back-end).
Those are my two recommendations; Virtuemart or Joomshopping. They both have shoppingcart features which I’m sure you could easily modify to be the users ‘bag’. Both seem to have a pretty good/proven track record and a well rounded community. I think either way you’ll be satisfied, but it does sound like SimpleCaddy may come up ‘just short’ of what you’re needing.