Desactivate a BUY button on countdown timer's Time Limit

gabaozin

Greetings,

I hope I find you in a good moment.

I'm working on a project where the client wants to reproduce the format of a group-buying site, like Groupon and so many others, in a Wordpress environment.

I'm showing prices and discounts information through Custom Field, and using a Countdown Timer Plugin to do the job of counting down (obviously).

I have tried several Countdown Timer Plugins and all of them just echo "Time Out" when it reaches the Time Limit.

The problem with such a simple action at the event is that end-clients would be able to continue buying even after the Daily Deal is over, resulting in financial problems with the supplier.

I'm trying to generate a code where the BUY button would be desactivated once Time Limit is reached, but I must confess that I'm kind of stucked here.

I'm hoping to find a good soul here to help me move on with this project.

The actual code is something like this:

if(($time_left < 0)&&($timeSince==1)&&((($time_left + $timeSinceTime) > 0)||($timeSinceTime == 0))){

if($eventText){
$content .= $eventTitle;
}
$content .= $timePrefix.sprintf(__("%s ago", 'fergcorp_countdownTimer'), fergcorp_countdownTimer_fuzzyDate((time() + $offset), $time, $time))."</abbr>";
if(!$standalone)
$content .= "</li>\r\n";
return $content;
}
elseif($time_left > 0){ //If the event has not yet happened yet
$fergcorp_countdownTimer_noEventsPresent = FALSE; //Set to FALSE so we know there's an event to display
$fergcorp_countdownTimer_jsUID[count($fergcorp_countdownTimer_jsUID)] = array("id" => $nonceTracker,
"targetDate" => $time,
);

I can't wait to see some ideas on how to achieve the end result I'm looking for.

Thanks so much in advance!

Gabriel Leveau

DaveRandom

I have a feeling we are going to need to see considerably more code before any help can be offered on this one...

gabaozin

Well, there's a BUY button on the page...
<img src=""> + <a href="">

There's a place in the code for an action at the Time Limit, that I can find by myself.

So maybe the suggestions could be on how to desactivate that <a href=""> using php, which I believe that doesn't require any previous code.

What do you think DaveRandom?

Thanks a lot!!!

DaveRandom

Well saying you want to "deactivate" it suggests the user already has a page loaded, with a button that you would like to disable after a period of time, in which case this a job for Javascript's setTimeout().

If it's just that you don't want people to be able to use the button on a newly loaded page after a certain time, just add a disabled="disabled" attribute to the button.

gabaozin

Yes, exactly.
It would be the first option.

So, in other words, my countdown timer would be just a visual item on the page, and the real job would be done on the very button I want to desactivate. Interesting!

I don't know of javascript, so I still can't make it work from the description you gave me, but thanks very much! I will try finding out how to code this and I'll let you know of my progress in the next days.

Have a nice weekend!

DaveRandom

Javascript is a tricky beast if you don't know how to do it... This may give you a few pointers...

You will need to calculate the time remaining as the page is loaded (in milliseconds)
Give your HTML <body> element an onload event something like this: <body onload="setTimeout(disableButton,$timeLeftms)"> where $timeLeftms is the time remaining in milliseconds
Give your button a unique 'ID' attribute - something like <input type="button" id="buttonToDisable" />
Your javascript disableButton function will look something like this:

function disableButton () {
  document.getElementById('buttonToDisable').disabled = true;
}

Have fun, and feel free to post back here if you want some more help 🙂