Custom Drupal Product Configurator
SIGMAXIM is dedicated to enabling companies to radically increase productivity and efficiency in their product development process. They came to Monarch Digital to develop a Drupal web application that integrates with their design software for manufacturers. This project was quite different from our usual web development activities, as the solution leveraged Drupal’s unique Field API and form builder to create an advanced part configurator.
With this configurator application, users can complete online orders by entering part dimensions and other settings and submit them to SIGMAXIM. Submitted orders are exported and sent to a backend design server to generate detailed configurations.
The Drupal web-app is built around the core Field API and uses a number of advanced contributed modules including:
- Conditional Fields - allows dependent settings and options
- Field Validation - allows advanced validation for field values, including validations based on other fields
- Data - for configurator tables
- Feeds - to import into data tables
Monarch contributed patches and enhancements to several of these existing projects.
In addition to the existing contributed modules, Monarch developed and contributed new modules designed specially for SIGMAXIM.
- Math Field - Dynamically evaluates math expressions on entity forms.
- Field Group Image - A simple module to allows an image in a field group.
The Math Field module now occupies an interesting and useful niche within the Drupal contributed module space, where it facilitates the ability to perform complex mathematical calculations within the scope of fields inside a node, without having to resort to using the PHP filter. This provides some very useful functionality without opening up your Drupal website to the potential security vulnerabilities that come with PHP stored inside the database.
The Field Group Image module, while not as ground breaking as the Math Field module, provides some additional functionality to the Field Group space of modules and features, allowing Drupal users to upload an image for a field group.
Overall, the SIGMAXIM Drupal application provides a great demonstration of how modular and extensible the Drupal framework is, pushing the boundaries of what developers might traditionally think of as possible with a content management system.