Special order web app ideas?

September 20, 2012 1:53 PM

I'm looking for a web (or desktop at a push) app that will help me track customer special orders.

These are essentially items we don't carry in the shop as normal but order in for people as and when.

It should be able to keep track of date, customer name, price agreed etc.

For extra points it could email/SMS (UK) the customer when the product comes into stock (we'd have to tell it with a tickbox or similar the product was in).

For extra extra points it might email a list of all open tickets to a defined address at the end of each day.

Any ideas? I've looked at various project management web apps and "to do" lists but none seem appropriate.

Thanks!

posted by dance to Technology (1 answer total)

How about just a normal intranet wiki? You could use templates so that the person creating or editing an order is just filling in values in a list but the page renders like an invoice for viewing/printing purposes. The same template could form a mailto: hyperlink that fills in the subject and body of the email with the details of the order, so that the user updating it as "in stock" can just send the email with another click. Using a wiki category to group open and closed tickets (which could also be handled by the template so that the user just marks an "open" or "closed" value) would let you have a single page listing all open tickets and it should be fairly easy to rig up some way to email that once per day.

From your posting history it sounds like you're familiar with PHP, which might make Mediawiki, the software which runs Wikipedia, a natural choice. But I personally like JAMWiki, which is a lighter, cleaner re-implementation in Java. A nice little feature with JAMWiki is that out of the box it can run in "flat file" mode without requiring a database (and consequently you can back up the entire site/application just by copying the directory off of the web server.)
posted by XMLicious at 4:47 PM on September 20, 2012