Ok, seems like no one is reading this post or knows how to solve the problem. On the good news front I did figure out how to create a gallery of products using our old friend the View module. After some tweaks of the style sheets it looks great. The latest version of views is a beast but just play around with it and you'll be up and riding in no time.

For now the client will have to un-publish the product node once it's sold, makes sense really cos all are one-off art pieces but it would be nice to have this done automagically.

Ryan, I have been known to dabble in a little PHP so I'll give this a try, thanks!

If you don't want to unpublish the node, you can also use the uc_stockstub module. It shows "out of stock" greyed out button instead of "add to cart" when inventory is 0. If you use this, you will need inventory_api, and hence mange your stock.

See these links:

http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/4792

http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/5181/out_stock_solutions

This is useful until inventory is replenished.

Right, that's what the line below the code example was pointing to... you'll need to wrap it in whatever if statement you need to accomplish that behavior. I don't have time to dig it up right now, but I believe there's a function you can pass $product->model to to find its stock level.

If I were you, instead of - 1 you might use - $product->qty in case the customer buys 2, for example.

Can you hand hold me here a little, where does this code go, create a Workflow-ng action? If so can you show me how to do this, I've played around with some actions but not sure where / how this one will work.

This has been the one thing that has really kept me from moving from ZenCart to Ubercart, the lack of ability to hide products with 0 inventory. This code snippet has worked perfectly for me.

This is how this is implimented:

1. Go to WORKFLOW-NG.
2. Select ADD A NEW RULE CONFIGURATION.
3. Select CUSTOMER COMPLETES CHECKOUT for the EVENT.
4. Give it a nice label (anything).
5. Select SUBMIT.
6. Select ADD AN ACTION under ACTIONS.
7. Select EXECUTE CUSTOM PHP CODE then select ADD.
8. Paste the code snippet (but without the <?PHP ?> tags, as these can not be in the PHP dialog)!

9. Select SUBMIT.

I tested this and it seems to work very well. When I purchased a product with a stock value of 1 the stock was correctly decremented to 0 and the product was unpublished! Now my customers will not see products with 0 qty, which is what I think makes the most sense for a lot of ecommerce sites.

I hope this can be included in a future version of Ubercart?

Now, just need to find a way to create a worklow-ng for setting products back to published if the stock changes from 0 to 1!

Be aware that the fix described above will only work reliably when exactly one person is browsing your site at a time. If multiple people are making purchase at the same time, this fix can (and at some point will) fail in its goal to restrict the quantity sold.

A proper solution requires applying concurrent programming techniques and DB transactions to ensure thread-safe limitation of purchase quantities to stock available, and it won't be as simple as a few lines of code.

Concurrency becomes an issue when you are reading/modifying/writing information in the DB from multiple processes simultaneously. Any separation in the code between the reading and the writing opens the possibility that two independent processes can step on each other. (This situation also exists in software development, which is why we use CVS/Bazaar to manage teams of developers working with the same code). Most of Drupal/Ubercart never has to deal with concurrency, because most modules either simply display the current content of the DB (a read-only operation), or modify user- or process-specific information (i.e., operate on data not shared between processes). Stock control is an exception, hence the need for a more sophisticated solution.