Ubercart-based POS / Kiosk

Question

I have a Drupal 6/Ubercart 2 website with a desktop-specific theme. I intend to create a POS/Kiosk theme for the site, to be used when the site is accessed via a tablet (and possibly via smartphone). That theme would be bare-bones... a couple of Views showing products, probably the AJAX cart module, and very little informational pages. The POS concept would involve a kiosk with an ipad that public customers in a retail location would be able to use to place orders right then and there.

I suppose I just want to see if anyone out there has done a setup like this, or whether anyone has any ideas on things to avoid, issues that may be encountered, etc. Ideally, the end result of this port would be a recipe of sorts, that everyone else could use for similar situations.

So far, potential issues I have come up with are:

1. Must auto-log out users upon successful order completion. Is there a way to do this in Drupal/Ubercart via stock settings or an existing module?

2. Some type of auto- or manual-logout for when a customer walks away from the POS without completing the order (so that the "next person up" can start with an empty cart, or can at least easily clear the cart and start their own shopping experience). I suppose this can be accomplished with a large "Click here to start a new session" button that would basically be a "rebranded" log out button...

3. ...I'm hoping other viewers of this question might be able to point out any other issues I may not have thoughts of yet.

Looking forward to any input anyone out there may have!

Answer 1

I'm working on a similar problem. I have an ubercart based shopping system that a customer wants to have available on a public computer in his store. We need to change themes, branding etc and auto-logout users. His users will also be ordering from home, so we have to identify that particular computer and change the behavior and look of the site when we know they are ordering from the in-store kiosk.

Kiosk module that may help

This module allows an administrator to put selected computers into "Kiosk Mode". "Kiosk mode" simply means that a given computer will have an extra flag set for template files, which allows a themer to exclude certain page elements, such as off-site navigation.

I'm installing this on my test server and we'll see how well it goes. I'm hoping to figure out how to get that variable (if $kiosk) into ubercart checkout conditions and trigger some actions based on it. It seems like themeing is pretty easy with this module but as for changing behavior, I'm not super sure how it will work.

Please let me know if you find any magic bullets as we're both trying to do a similar thing and i'd be great to share a solution.

UPDATE: I've been working with kiosk mode module (drupal 7 version) for a bit and have been able to create custom rules by calling the kiosk_is_kiosk function defined in the module. Simply use custom php condition in rules with this code:

 return kiosk_is_kiosk();

And you can have different workflows for kiosk terminals than for regular on-line users. So for example, once an order is finished the kiosk will log out the user, but not a person using the same site from the home.

-Zachary