Donations

Hi,

1. Yes.

2. No, it's not mandatory at all.

3. Well, there is no such mechanism. You could have a custom product field where you would enter the percentage accomplished already and update it manually periodically.

Hi,

3. Not really. This link is for Joomla custom fields, not HikaShop custom fields. So what this article talks about is not possible here.
However, you can do something quite similar. You could develop a plugin implementing the "fields API" from HikaShop ( www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/6...entation.html#fields ) in order to add your own type of custom fields in HikaShop. And you could have it so that it would calculate the percentage dynamically when displaying it on the product page in the code of the plugin.
So it's similar to what you found but instead of putting the PHP code in the interface of the backend, you need to put it in a plugin.

Hi,

Well, I understand what you mean, but from experience, I don't see many uses for that.
Here for example, doing what you want requires at least getting information on the current product, running a MySQL query and some processing on the results of the query to be able to display the percentage. So yo'ure looking at at least a dozen lines of code.
If you know how to do that in Joomla, you likely already know how to put up a Joomla plugin (a xml with 10 lines, and a PHP file with a few lines). So as a developer you should be able to easily put up a plugin together to do that and it wouldn't take you much longer than just writing your PHP code in a PHP custom field.
What's more, usually, when you want to customize custom fields, you want to extend from an existing custom field type. That way, it simplifies the code you need a lot.

Having a "goal" option in the donation plugin is a good idea. I'll note that on our todo list.

Regarding supporting Joomla custom fields, I've looked at it in the past, and it's not practical. HikaShop doesn't use Joomla's model system because it didn't exist when HikaShop was created. Also, the structure of the custom fields in Joomla is quite different from what we have in HikaShop. We would basically have to rewrite a big part of how HikaShop works. And the gain are not that important since most of the things you can do with the Joomla custom field types can also be do with HikaShop's custom field types.

Hi,

A. Both can be useful and can serve different purposes. Running a MySQL query is nice when you only need to update an information in the database and is quite lightweight. PHP code can be used for when you need to run chained MySQL queries, or when you need to do things outside the database, like contacting a web service to update some information, or write a file somewhere, etc.
A PHP action is nice for a PHP developer who doesn't know how to develop Joomla plugins and/or just want to run some of his code without hassle. But as a long term solution I would rather recommend learning how to write Joomla plugins and developping a proper plugin for his code. It's cleaner and it will be better to maintain in the long run.

B. it's still on the roadmap. Please understand that we have a really long todo list and not everything we add to it can be added in the next release. Some things are added years later.