A website sells three types of components. What's a good way to make an interactive component compatability checker for visitors?

Question

A company sells a variety of component As, a variety of component Bs and a variety of component Cs (for example CPUs, motherboards and RAM). They want some kind of web app that allows a visitor to select A3000, B64 and C24, and see if that combination will is compatible.

Their website is built in Joomla.

What would be a good way to go about creating something like this?

The two thoughts I have currently is a searchable database like this: http://processormatch.intel.com/CompDB/

Or something like the 'post new ad' on Gumtree where selecting the first category opens up the second list of compatible pieces, and then a third: http://www.gumtree.com/add_posting.html

I don't have much database experience, so the simpler the solution the better.

Thanks for any thoughts!

Answer 1

For computer hardware there are some solutions available as plugin for oscommerce and descendants (aka dedicated e-commerce software). But their use is quite limited since the logic for this kind of solution is usualy quite complex.

Its mostly not select everything and then ... but select one and only the compatible selections are left or a more wizard like approach which step by step leads you through the process of creating a custom product.

Furthermore Joomla is not an ecommerce solution, Virtuemart would be, but then again its "only" a shopping cart extension. Try googling "osCommerce Product Customization Module (PC Configurator)" or variations of that to get an idea what kind of solution is available. The first step should be selecting your ecommerce system.

The most common solution for me is to program a custom wizard and and in the last step e.g. just insert everything into the shopping cart of a standard ecommerce solution.

FYI : Custom products in Drupal or OSCommerce?