UberCart: service products and accommodation?

Question

What is the best way to deal with "service" products. For example, let's say I'm a painter and wish to advertise these services on a site that also sells paint brushes and paint. Now, the paint brushes and paint I can easily set up as products that are sold for X and Y amount. But when creating a product called "Painting your house", it doesn't make sense to give it a price, or a quantity etc.

In other words, I need a way to generically define a "service node" so that clients can "place orders" but in actual fact, it will just send a notification to me, saying that user so and so is interested in letting me do his paint job.

I can of course, just create a node type called "service" and this could in actual fact just have all the fields on it. But what would be ideal is to have it hook into UberCart.

Also, I was wondering what is the best way to go about setting up an "accommodation" field. I.e. Instead of a product, people can book "rooms" or basically request a quotation on a night in a hotel (as prices change).

So far the only solution I have for this whole scenario is to:

1. Let ubercart manage products (paint brushes)
2. Create a node for "services"
3. Find some other module or simply also create a node for "accomodation".
4. Mimic (2) and (3) to provide a similar checkout process as UberCart

Can anybody suggest a better way that i can instead use UberCart to cater for (2) and (3)?

Answer 1

They aren't complete solutions, but two modules come to mind on this:

The Signup integration for Ubercart module allows you to sell signups on a node and has the users fill in profile fields during checkout (like, name, e-mail etc.). This could be helpful particularly for selling the hotel rooms.

The UC Node Checkout module is great for selling non-products that are kinda like products where you want to gather more information. There is a great Drupal Easy tutorial about it.