Custom UberPOS setup for a bookstore

Drupal user mndonx wrote in to tell us how she's building an UberPOS setup at a bookstore with a custom theme and some added functionality through Views. It's still a work in progress but it's looking great!

Here's what she wrote:

I themed the UberPOS module for use with a bookstore in mind. This store wants to be able to sell books online AND sell them in a brick & mortar store, but not have to run two databases or pay the expensive monthly fees of using integrated services.

For this store, it is important to have the most user-friendly interface possible. I’m not much of a PHP developer, so what I’ve done here is purely with Views, Panels, CSS and jQuery.

Here’s what the POS looks like when you first log in (click for a bigger image):

This page is a panel. Lucky for me, the module developers made it so you can add in each button to a panel individually! It’s basically two columns with the purchase list area and a few buttons on the left, and the rest of the buttons on the right. In between are bits of helper text I added via the panel. Perhaps there is a better way to incorporate that text in the layout – or using tooltips. One good thing is that, for this purpose, the POS really only has to work on one computer (though ideally it would work on all!)

Obviously I subbed out custom buttons, and added a little CSS that makes the button looked depressed upon hover. I left in the tiny links for help. The more help for cashiers available on the POS, the better!

The bookstore does not want cashiers to have to type in an SKU for every item, so I opted for a “Find item” view that toggles open & closed via jQuery. Here’s what this interface looks like when Open:

Clicking on any of the items (dummy items here) will add them to the purchase list to the left. Because there will be thousands of items, the exposed filter part of the view is key. One can filter by Title and Author (just typing in part of a word will help narrow the options) or by Category (or section). Here’s the list now limited by Category:

You’ll notice that I’ve also added “edit” buttons next to items in the views list – if you need to edit an item on the fly. (However, you cannot do so in the middle of a sale & not have to start over.)

I used a similar concept for adding a Miscellaneous Item, since I don’t expect users to remember a category’s TID. Now they can type an amount, click Misc. (called DEPT in the original interface) and then select what category the item comes from. See the example:

I attempted to do the same thing with members, since one can’t be expected to necessarily know a user’s UID. However, for some reason the program is not accepting the UID coming from the View. I’m not sure exactly why. But ideally, they could just select the user from the list & click Member. To help, I just added the UID next to the name in the dropdown, so at least the cashier could located the UID, then manually enter it in the field. I did notice that there needs to be at least one item in the purchase list for a Member to be entered. Here’s what that view currently looks like:

I hope to improve upon this work over the coming months and report it back here.

This module is very exciting! Thanks to all who have put time into it thusfar!

Amanda