My thoughts here are all speculative since I haven't accomplished this myself or even really attempted to work it out... but!

I've recommended a multi-step solution like this in the past:

1. Require users to create an account if they want to purchase customized business cards. Explain it as they need to do this so their creations can be saved for future purchases.
2. Create a business card node type that uses CCK fields and such to create the business card.
3. Create the business card product that users never actually see. Here's why... you can create a custom form or a cart link that adds this product to the cart with the appropriate attributes/options set to get the price and choices right. When the customer tries to browse to this page, I'd just redirect them to their "portfolio" of business cards... probably most easily accomplished w/ a view listing their business card nodes.
4. When an order is checked out, if I were you I'd create a copy of the customer's "template" node just in case they make changes later. Let them know this, so they don't expect last minute changes to show up in their order. Obviously, the copy you make shouldn't be editable by them, but it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to have viewing access to it somehow to verify they get their order properly.

Those are my thoughts, and it requires you to fill in the blanks in a few places w/ other modules and some custom code. Check out the cart links docs here and in the module settings page itself for more info.

Hi there, I'm working on a similar problem with custom orders and was wondering if you've made any headway with the approach described above. Any additional feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Z.

I was curious if anyone has actually got this working and if so what steps did you take.

I'm about to start work on a "custom oil painting" website in which users upload a photo and then we send mail them the oil painting.

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks a bunch Ryan. Let me know the progress.

I've followed your advice in the original post. I've created a node with a module (then added CCK fields to it) for my template node. Once the user submits this node, i add it to my cart on node_insert() with uc_cart_add_item(). I use this instead of uc_cart_links as uc_cart links are not able to add $item->data. After the node is submitted and the item is added to the cart, i redirect the user to "cart" with node_form_submit() and it shows the user their current cart.

I'm using hook_form_alter to edit the cart's form (uc_cart_view_form) to display the image and title from my node instead of the products image and title. I've also edited the link on the "product title" to be "node/$NID/edit".

On my nodes update. If check and see if my node's nid matches any of the node ids which exist in my shopping cart. If it's the same node, I remove that entry from the cart, then re-add it with the edited details. I do this by storing the node reference in $item[data][mynid] and then iterating through the current carts items ( returned by uc_cart_get_contents() ) then using uc_cart_remove_item() to remove them, should a dupe exist.

This is getting rather hackish, but it could all be properly abstracted. At the moment I don't have time to do it myself, but it could be done. I'm interested to see what you've come up with. Posted this so that other know how they can go about doing something similar.

Issues I've run into code digging:

function hook_cart_display aka. uc_product_cart_display
This hook is not accessible from normal modules. This would be useful to change things like the link in the "product title". Also this hook doesn't allow one to change the product cart images.

in function uc_cart_view_form

$form['items'][$i]['image']['#value'] = uc_product_get_picture($display_item['nid']['#value'], 'cart');

imho. uc_product_get_picture should be changed to module_invoke("get_picture", $display_item['nid']['#value'], 'cart');
or even better module_invoke("get_picture", $display_item, 'cart');

This would allow someone who's created their own product module to determine how to display their image and use some logic against variables they've added to their "$items"

For those interested, I posted up UC Node Checkout just now... I have to come fill in some of the documentation and make a contrib post here on Ubercart.org, but it's there in CVS. I imagine it'll get packaged up as a snapshot release tonight.