Sorry for the horrible title, couldn’t think of a way to explain the question in the subject line succinctly.
For a web business that’s in its earliest planning stages, I know we need to have this sort of work flow being done on our server automatically (except for the customer’s part):
- Visitors/customers fill in a form with personal details (easy enough for me)
- Details get entered into a database (also easy)
- Customer pays (again… straightforward)
- After payment is confirmed, and using an already set-up MS Word Mail Merge document, these details should be mapped to the corresponding merge fields
- The Word document, which could be either a single page document or an ebook, would be converted to PDF and a download link sent to the purchaser by mail.
Oh, and all this needs to be done in real-time, instantly (or within a few moments) so the file is available for download pretty much after sale.
Now, steps 1, 2 and 3 are, as I mention, simple to set up and are within my skill set.
It’s steps 4 and 5 where we move vastly beyond my knowledge. I’m a [del]lover not a fighter[/del] designer not a programmer, and while I can tweak PHP scripts to a degree, I’m no expert in any scripting language, nor am I realy good with MS Word scripts.
I guess what I’m asking is:
a) Is all this possible with a single script, or would a suite of different scripts have to be used?
b) By some miracle, does anyone know of any pre-packaged scripts/programs that perform all of these chores?
c) If neither of the above are true, how difficult do you think the programming would be to create such a bespoke script, and what kinda money would you guesstimate would be feasible for such a coup? Would this be something one could ask of someone at Elance or one of the other hire-a-coder type places?
Right now we’re at the very very very beginning phases of forming this enterprise and I’m just asking around. Ideally we’d have someone create the script (or manipulate existing scripts so they do the job right) and even hire the person as a tech. But I’m not sure if we’re asking too much while not being able to pay huge amounts. So I ask here, hoping someone has enough knowledge of what might be necessary or even feasible in creating such a relatively seamless (to the customer) work flow.
Whew. Anyone? Did I make any sense while explaining this? Any recommendations would be extraordinarily helpful!