I always thought the script.aculo.us drag’n’drop-shop demo was stu­pid. It seemed illog­i­cal and only really prac­ti­cal for stu­pid puncy lit­tle shops with five or ten prod­ucts — cer­tainly, with every­thing listed on the same page.

Then it hit me — this is per­fect for shuf­fling doc­u­ments around. CYIADA (see-uh-da), is (par­tially) about sell­ing doc­u­ments and resources elec­tron­i­cally — and it does that with pre-paid cred­its. This, of course, means that there doesn’t have to be any cum­ber­some check­out stage. Bet­ter than Shopify (excel­lent though that is), potentially.

Drag doc­u­ments you like when brows­ing into a float­ing “My Resources” bin on the side of the page, AJAX is used to throw up a “con­firm pur­chase” DIV which presents sim­ple “yes”/“oops” options, and keep mov­ing. It’d be triv­ial to mod­ify the con­firm view to have a “pur­chase for my whole group” check­box (which would, of course, change the cost), too. Any­thing beyond that might be too complex.

Of course, there would be grace­ful degra­da­tion for those with­out JavaScript turned on… because some­one has to ruin the party :P

Tags: AJAX