How can farmOS make products available?

[mstenta]

Welcome to the forum @milovanderlinden!

I’m glad you started this topic, as it is something that has been bouncing around in conversations for a while now. Here is one:

Tracking Products and Inventory - Product Quantity

Been noodling about how to better manage products explicitly. Talked to Mike, and rolled around some of my own ideas. @paul121 and Mo this is relevant I think to the cases where we want to track inventory. I also know that @Farmer-Ed you’re generating products, curious to know how you manage it also and what you think about this given your experience. Anywho… here’s where we ended up (currently I’m testing this setup on a test instance, will provide some more feedback as I go) but figured I…

Another (older) discussion worth reading is:

eCommerce integration

There has been a lot of talk over the years about how farmOS could feed data into an eCommerce system - or even provide one of its own (using Drupal Commerce: https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce). Let’s use this thread to discuss big ideas!

As a first step, I created a basic “Product” asset type module here: GitHub - mstenta/farm_product

This is not included in farmOS “core”, but it can be added by anyone who wants to experiment with it. Combined with the core Inventory module, this allows capturing of products, product types, and tracking inventory levels over time. So the “data storage” of a lot of what you described is in place.

The next step is to build more UI/UX tooling in farmOS to make it easier to enter/maintain that data. I think that is the biggest hurdle to adoption (and is true of ALL data, not just product inventory). That is the mountain we are always climbing: making it easier for farmers.

One small step that will be included in farmOS 3.1.0 (the next “minor” release, tentatively scheduled for next month) is an “Inventory quick form”. Pull request here: Inventory quick form by mstenta · Pull Request #766 · farmOS/farmOS · GitHub

Another idea I had a while back was general mechanism to support “asset transformations”. For example, it is currently possible to create a “Plant” asset that represents your tomato plants. And it is possible to create a “Product” asset that represents harvests/boxed tomatoes ready for sale, linked to the “Plant” asset as a parent. But there isn’t any UI/UX tooling to help facilitate those transformations. You basically have to create the records manually to represent what you want. I think there is a lot of potential for next steps there!

I would love to hear what others in the community think of these ideas.