Suggestions for building a clothing exchange site with Joomla/virtuemart

Question

Hello guys,

I want to build a website to allow users exchange clothes with each other.The website will be similar to an online auction site and a book exchange. This will be a point-based exchange community. The website allows users to

1) register for a private account

2) list items based on a specific, yet simple form that they can keep track of in their account

3) Rate items that they have received based on three simple criteria

4) Admin can add/delete products and also categorise them

5) Sizes labels etc can be assigned to products

6) Other users can upload their products/categorize them assign

7) users can perform faceted search on the products and filter by size, label etc..

One main point here is that there is no payment involved. I was thinking to use virtuemart over joomla for this kinda website and needed an opinion on how tough would it be customize virtuemart/joomla to meet the requirements.

Can you please suggest some other architecture if you think that the above arechitecture is not feasible to build this sorta website? Magento is not an option.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Surely people need be able to exchange items? From taking a quick look at your specification, I don't think your list covers all of the required functionality.

While cash payment isn't required, it sounds like payment might be involved because your site is a 'point-based exchange community'. I think this might actually make the task of creating your site slightly more complicated because there's less chance of using pre-written modules (most e-commerce CMSs are geared towards cash payments).

I'd suggest you look at an ecommerce system called Ubercart (which is based on Drupal). This can be customised reasonably easily by writing modules which plug-in to the main CMS. There's also a very supportive developer community. To work out the feasibility of using Ubercart, I'd recommend posting your question on the Ubercart forum (www.ubercart.org).