Product Personalizer for Dolibarr: web-to-print studio

Add a full personalisation studio to Dolibarr. The seller — or the customer himself, from a plain link — composes what will be printed on the product: text, pictures, shapes, clip art, QR codes and vector drawings, spread over as many print areas as the product needs. The price is updated at every change, from the surface covered, the colours used, the printing method and the quantity. Once the design is approved, the server builds a print-ready file: a PDF at true size with bleed and trim marks, a vector SVG, and one transparent PNG per area. 

Who is it for? Printers, screen printers, embroiderers, garment decoration workshops, engravers, promotional goods makers, print-on-demand shops, and anyone selling a product the customer chooses to personalise. One print area or six, one item or a thousand: the principle is the same.

The personalisation studio

• A self-contained editor, written without any outside library: it opens inside Dolibarr, in the customer's browser, and works on a tablet too.
• Layers: text, picture, shape, clip art, QR code, vector drawing. Each one can be shown, hidden, locked, moved up or down, and duplicated.
• Multi-line text with font, size, colour, bold, italic and alignment. Fonts reproduced exactly in the print file are marked as such.
• Pictures uploaded by the customer, with the real resolution computed at the size asked for, and a warning when it is too low.
• QR codes built by the server, with the chosen error correction level: they stay readable once printed.
• Background removal and vectorising of logos and line art, done by the server, with no outside service.
• Undo and redo over sixty steps, snapping, grid, bleed and safe-margin guides, zoom and fit.
• Mockup of the product with five finishes: none, gloss, emboss, spot varnish, matte.
• Generated pictures as an option: with no service set up, the module composes a picture itself from the words of the request, sending nothing outside.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Delete, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+D, arrow keys.

Print areas

• As many print areas as the product needs: front, back, sleeves, handle, front and back of a card, or any area drawn by hand.
• Every area carries its position, its size, its shape (rectangle or ellipse), its fixed price, its price per cm² and its largest number of colours.
• An area can be required, or reserved for one variant: a pocket that exists on one model only, for instance.
• One button creates the four usual areas of a garment at the size of the canvas.
• The map of the areas shows each of them to scale, with its code and its size.
• The product carries its canvas, its bleed, its safe margin, the resolution expected and its colour mode: RGB, CMYK or greyscale.
• Eight switches decide which tools are open to the customer: pictures, text, shapes, clip art, QR codes, generated pictures, saving a template, downloading the proof.

Printing methods and quantity brackets

• Seven methods installed from the start: screen printing, direct to garment, embroidery, sublimation, UV printing, laser engraving, heat transfer vinyl.
• Each method carries four costs that combine: setup, price per item, price per cm² and price per colour.
• Quantity brackets replace those costs from a given quantity: this is how an honest price ladder is built.
• Each method states what it cannot do: largest number of colours, printable surface, resolution expected, and whether it handles photographs, vector art and four-colour printing.
• The module warns before the workshop does: too many colours, a design wider or taller than the machine prints, a resolution too low, a photograph given to a method that does not render it.
• A Dolibarr service can be attached to a method, so the decoration turnover is followed apart from the product itself.
• Methods can be changed, switched off, and as many new ones added as your workshop practises.

A price that can be explained

• The price is computed line by line: personalisation fee, price of every area used, setup of the method, printing.
• The surface actually covered and the number of distinct colours are measured on the composition, not estimated.
• A price ladder gives the all-in unit price at 1, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500 items: the simplest argument to give a customer hesitating over a quantity.
• The price is updated while the design is composed, in the back office studio as well as in the customer's.
• The computed price is written on the design, then feeds the line of the quote, the order or the invoice.
• Feasibility warnings come with the price: the customer sees what does not work before approving.

The customer link, with no account

• A public link, with no account and no password, opens the studio to the customer on one design alone.
• The link carries a lifetime and closes on its own, or with one click.
• The page is in the colours of your company: no menu, no back office, no sign of Dolibarr.
• The customer only sees the tools you opened for that product, and the server refuses the rest, even when forced.
• Your note is shown above the studio, and the reason for a rejection is repeated to the customer when he opens his link again.
• The number of views is counted, and every opening is written in the history.
• The link closes as soon as the customer has sent his work, which then waits for approval in Dolibarr.

Approval and print-ready files

• A clear circuit: draft → with the customer → to approve → approved → produced, with a reason when rejected.
• A design that has been sent is frozen: nobody changes it until it is accepted or rejected.
• On approval the server rebuilds the files from the layers that were saved. What is printed is what was approved.
• PDF at true size, one page per area, with bleed, trim marks and safe margin, in CMYK when the product asks for it. Shapes and QR codes are vector, text is text.
• Vector SVG for cutting machines, one transparent PNG per area at the resolution asked for, and a preview used everywhere in Dolibarr.
• An optional watermark on the proof the customer downloads.
• A full history: creation, saves, link opened, customer views, submission, approval, files built, attachment to a record.

Templates and batch runs

• Any composition can be saved as a template, with its thumbnail, its category and the choice of offering it in the studio.
• A template lands on another product: areas are matched by their code, even when the sizes differ.
• Batch runs: one CSV or Excel file, one template, and as many designs as there are rows.
• The columns of the file replace the marks of the template, including inside a QR code: a hundred customers, a hundred designs, one template.
• Every row produces a design, its print files and its price for its own quantity.
• A row in error carries its message and does not stop the others; rows in error are retried with one click.
• A sample file, built from the chosen template, is offered for download.
• The library ships with 12 shapes and 18 vector clip arts, sharp at any size, and grows with your own pictures, SVG included.

Quotes, orders and invoices

• On a quote, an order or an invoice: a block shows the designs attached, with the preview, the state, the quantity, the total and the print file.
• A selector offers the lines of the record carrying a personalisable product: the studio opens already filled with the product, the customer and the quantity.
• The design is added as a line of the record, with the detail of the areas, the method and the all-in unit price.
• The print-ready file can be attached to the order as soon as the design is approved.
• A product card says whether the product is personalisable, with a direct link to its settings.
• A dashboard gathers the designs by state, the open customer links, those whose resolution is too low, and how much each method is used.

Security and data

• Every write passes through the same sieve: unknown areas dropped, closed layer types refused, values brought back into sensible bounds, path data validated.
• Files are never served straight: every request is authenticated, and a file name trying to climb out of the folders is refused.
• Uploaded SVG files are cleaned of their scripts and external references before being offered.
• The print file is always rebuilt by the server, never accepted from the browser.
• Eight separate rights: read, write, delete, design, approve, share, batch, setup.
• The key of an image service, if one is set up, never reaches the studio.
• Deleting a design deletes its layers, its history and its files.

Technical information

• Works with Dolibarr 16 and above (tested on 23.0.4), PHP 7.4 to 8.4, MySQL/MariaDB.
• No outside dependency: no JavaScript library, no online service, no binary to install. TCPDF and PhpSpreadsheet are the ones Dolibarr already ships.
• Multi-company: personalisable products, designs, templates and library kept apart by entity.
• Five languages: French, English, Italian, German, Spanish.
• Automatic work: a command line script and a scheduled job build the waiting batch runs, close the expired links and rebuild the missing print files.
• Studio colours can be set — accent, buttons, button text, dark theme — with an immediate preview, on the customer's page as well.
• Installed with the Dolibarr module manager. Nothing in the core is changed: the module is added and removed cleanly.
• A 43-page PDF manual is supplied, and support comes from the publisher: NextGestion — contact@nextgestion.com

Demo of the Product Personalizer module
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