Coupon Manager

[curlypinky]

Hello all,

So I am thinking out-loud here. I am looking to use CMSms for an information site for small shopping center. They want a merchant directory, so I figured the company directory module would work fine for that. They also want to have coupons and specials for participating merchants. I know that could simply be a field in the company directory but we would also like provide a coupon list to show all the available coupons or specials (and while I'm making my wishlist - make it easy to print a coupon page).

So I am trying to figure out which module is most appropriate to this. I just came across ctlmodulemaker, I've never encountered it before but it might be what I need, or possibly use cataloger to manage the merchant directory. I haven't used either of these yet but I will experiment.

Has any one else needed a similar solution?

thanks!
Alane

[plger]

I haven't, but I can try to "think out-loud" with you.
You could use any of the three solutions, although the Company Directory seems to me less suited for your case. Here's what I think are the main possibilities :

1) Using Company Directory to manage the merchants (with any advantage of this module), and Cataloger or a CTLModuleMaker module to manage the coupons. If you use Cataloger, you'd need to use the merchants as parents, and coupons as children - this way you could retrieve coupons by merchant (calling the children of a specific parent) or all together. But this separation means that you'd need to manage merchants in both modules (or to use events to do so, if the Company Directory supports events - which, considering the authors, should be the case). In any case, it seems that all this trouble would make option 2 better :

2) The Cataloger could do everything. You set your merchants to be categories, and your coupons to be items. Then you can create templates in the menu manager to display all items, or items by category.

3) You could also create a module using CTLModuleMaker that would do all of this. You create two levels, the first being the merchants, the second the coupons. Then you can retrieve the coupons either all together or by merchants, with more ordering possibilities than with the Cataloger. Plus: you'd have the option to search only among coupons or merchants... But of course, you should expect some subjectivity from me here...

All in all, I think you should go with either 2) or 3).

As for your printing thing, with any of the solution you could have different templates used for printing...

Plger

[curlypinky]

Thanks Plger! I hadn't realized I had a reply, I would have responded sooner.
The project is going to go forward so I am going to be working on this, I think I will try to do this with your CTLModuleMaker, it seems like it is more flexible so once I learned how to use it I could apply it to other situations. I'll share my results once the project moves into production.

Thanks!!
Alane

[plger]

Glad to hear it!
If you have any question, don't hesitate. I'm looking forward seeing your results.