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    Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

    One of my Miva 5.5 clients just got an email from another store that's using Miva. The email says you can order gift certificates for his brick and mortar store online, and they will be emailed as PDFs so that customers can print them out and bring them into the physical store.

    Counterfeiting issues aside, is there some kind of module that does this? Where someone can purchase a gift certificate in Miva and some sort of customized PDF is automatically generated and emailed? I'm thinking the merchant might be creating and emailing the PDFs manually, but I just wanted to see if anyone knew of something like this.

    Thanks for your input.

    #2
    Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

    My guess would be that they are manually fulfilling that pdf gift cert request in conjunction with one of the remaining 3rd party Gift Certificate modules available. It's possible they have a customized mod, but unlikely due to costs and upkeep associated.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

      Yes, as a PDF its hard (read cost effective) to do anything automated. However, we did a semi-auto project that feed the Gift Cert to a web page. That HTML page was linked from the fulfillment module. The Store's admin would also use that link to open the page and "Print it to PDF and then forwarded that on in case the customer didn't have a PDF printer available.

      Even being semi-automatic, it was only justified because the store did 10/20 a month. (Wedding Gift site).
      Bruce Golub
      Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

      Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
      phosphormedia.com

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        #4
        Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

        I did a project some years ago, where the Miva module called a PHP script that called the open-source ImageMagick library. ImageMagick was able to generate PDF output, as well as other standard types such as JPEG. I think there are probably some other packages for producing PDF, as well as some Web services that you can hook up to via HTTP during checkout, or perhaps later on via an admin button. These services and/or packages may not be free, but maybe you get what you pay for. Image Magick was somewhat buggy and poorly documented at the time, although it's probably better today.
        Kent Multer
        Magic Metal Productions
        http://TheMagicM.com
        * Web developer/designer
        * E-commerce and Miva
        * Author, The Official Miva Web Scripting Book -- available on-line:
        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/IS...icmetalproducA

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

          This email was from a little Mom & Pop fishing shop that was advertising the service, so I'm guessing they probably weren't using any elaborate tech solution. But since I noticed they were using Miva, I thought there might be a module. But my guess is that they've got some kind of desktop publishing template for a gift certificate and they just fill in the relevant information, save as PDF, then email. Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

            You might want to checkout Viking Coders Gift Certificate Manager. I seem to remeber it can send an HTML or image via email. Not sure if it is what you need, but might be worth a look.
            Richard Waters

            www.MivaWebmaster.com
            [email protected]
            Tel: 541-943-3268

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Automated Gift Certificate PDFs

              Call and ask Mom or Pop. They might share their solution.

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