Made to Order Items

I was curious if anyone had any advice on a made to order product widget/plugin.

I'd like to able to accept a certain number of orders per month for hand crafted items.  The customer should me able to select from a set of delivery dates.

I.e.  I'll make 10 wooden cars a month, the person orders one for the month of december.  There should be 9 remaining for other people to order.  On January 1, or after a period of time, the counter resets.

I'd like to leave as much of the core site alone to allow for ease of future upgrades.  Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

To expand upon this idea, is there a way to augment or grat permissions to other crafters to add their own products?

Again, I'd like to do this with the minimal amount of modifications to the core product.

Is this feasible?

Thanks

kraney wrote:
I dont get quite what you need. But I guess you want to sell in lots of N (10) products per month and you want your customer select from which monthly lot(s) they want to order.I think you could do it with creating a product with an inventory of the size of your lot (10)
I hope it helps

That's what I've done as a work around.

I created a "Wooden Car - 12/03/2012" product variant and added an attribute of shipping date.

Will see how it holds up in the long run.