Thread

I’ve been asked to create a dutch auction in a website. Since the concept is new to many (and was to me) I’ll explain.

I have an event coming up, with room for a set amount of people (changes each event).
People can bid on seats in this event, each person needs to be able to bid for multiple seats.
Bids are listed highest to lowest.
Bids too low and outside the seat count range need some indication of such, either visual (easy) or email notifications (harder, but preferred).

Upon closing of the bidding, the lowest bid within the seat count becomes the set ticket price. No e-commerce needed here, just a system to track bids and capture email addresses for notifications etc.

I’d need people to be able to edit their bids, and delete bids.

I’ve been trying out different methods using channels, comments and even freeform, but I’m just not getting this right. I’d love any ideas on this from those of you more code-skilled than I am.

Have you tried saef entries for the bids? Since safecracker is available for all, I think it would work from a first glance at your specs.

I would setup each event as a channel entry, then each bid as an entry related to the event channel entry.

I believe the email notifications would be the trickiest part in EE2. There’s this: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/mx-notify-control/ but I don’t think it’s finished yet.

I tried this first, because it seemed the most sensible. My trouble with that was limiting people to a single bid, forcing them to either edit or delete once the bid is placed. Since I’m tied to a seat count, I can’t have multiple bids per person or the count gets thrown off.

I can do without email notifications for bidders. As long as I am able to set up a landing page post-bid that thanks them.

My trouble with that was limiting people to a single bid

Just use last one, by date (or the one with the latest edit_date).

What about using a jquery validation to make sure the email addresses are unique?

For example: http://jquery.bassistance.de/validate/demo/milk/

The form can check a reference page that searches for the email address and returns true/false. You just need to add the ‘@’ character to the valid url characters in the config file.

So freeform seems to have the best fit here, because it lets me email admins when a bid is placed and it emails the bidder with a receipt.

Having multiple bids seems ok because they just keep bidding higher when they want to stay in the seat count range.

But… If each person selects a number of seats, 1-6, to bid on, I have no idea how to adjust the freeform entries output to count seats and verify against the seat_count. I’ll post over at Solspace as well.

Thanks Jeremy and Ingmar for the repsonses so far!