Hey Guys & Gals,

A client of mine has just ordered a new website to be designed with us and i need your advice on how best to approach his requirements, in terms of scripts/programming language etc. He wants a website designed where the user can design a custom number plate for a car/bike and then checkout with their order/design.

Basically this is what he requires below:

1.The user selects the 'Design Your Custom Plate Here' link from the main/home page and is direct to the 'number plate designer area'
2.The user inputs the vehicle registration number, then selects the desired text font, border colour etc,,
3.Once the user is happy with the designed plate, the he selects 'Buy Here' and proceeds to checkout.
4.He then pays for the chosen design
5.The order consisting of ; An image of the designed plate, the written specification i.e. Font, border colour etc, is then sent to Auto Part Distribution to print the chosen number plate design, assemble the number plate & dispatch.

So what im asking you guys is there any scripts you can recommend which will give my client what he requires. I am very good with ecommerce side of things, the only thing im unsure of how to proceed with and actually create is the number plate design section of the site.

Do you guys have any recommendations on how i would go about this please? Thanks for your advice in advance!!

any advice on this please guys?

I wouldn't think there will be a pre-existing script for this. Seems like it's going to be custom coding, but I could be wrong. Is the idea that the customer is making all these choices from a list? So they pick the font, color, etc and then pay and get their image and the order is sent to the auto part store?

Other than creating the image everything else seems like a form. You present the options, they make the choices, and their choices get sent to the auto parts store.

As far as the image is concerned I'm not entirely sure how you would code that. I'm thinking Flash might work well since you can create an image with the various parts and use scripting to change the color, font, etc. and add their number. I'm not a Flash expert so I couldn't tell you the details on how, but I'm confident it can be done.

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the post mate. I was hoping there was a pre-existing script for this, but im not sure which categories/languages i should be looking in on sites such as hotscripts.com to check it out. Do you have any suggestions just to point me in the right direction of what areas i should be looking in??

I have the feeling this is going to have to be a custom-job but i want to look around the ensure there is definitely not a script already doing this, just need pointing in the right direction for the minute.

customers ay? lol

Other than creating the image itself it sounds mostly like a form. Your basic html and maybe some javascript will cover the front end and a scripting language like php will cover the back end of emailing the details to whoever needs them.

I'm not really sure how you would create the image. Like I said I think this is something Flash with Action Scripting can handle, but that's not my specialty. I would think either javascript or php could be used to pass the values to the Flash application.

If this can be done with programming then it's probably going to be a server side language like php or asp.net. The choice will rely more on what's available on your client's server than anything else. If you can do this in php you can do it in asp too.

Thanks for getting back to me. i will post this as a job in the appropriate section. many thanks for your advice Steven.

Glad to help. Sorry I couldn't help more.