A Guide to Drupal eCommerce and Site Development

Step by step instructions for Drupal site development and the Ubercart eCommerce module

Welcome to My Guide to Drupal Development and eCommerce

Drupal is a wonderful and powerful Content Management System. One of the reasons Drupal is so popular is because of its open source nature, active community of supporters, and a rich library of open source plug-in modules written by Drupal supporters. One of the most popular modules is the Ubercart eCommerce module. Since release, Ubercart powers over 15,000 commercial web sites, and the authors of Ubercart have become ridiculously busy. They've been so busy that quality documentation of Ubercart has not been written. The goal of this web site is to provide this much needed documentation in the form of step-by-step instructions. Plus, along the way I will be including quite a bit about mastering Drupal as well.

I spoke at DrupalCampLA 2010:
You can download my PowerPoint slides and view the video of my talk covering how to create a Custom Ubercart Import / Export module and How to Create Custom Digital Download Products by visiting here.

-Blake Senftner
Installing the site, Feb 10th, 2010
Last updated: August 1st, 2011

This appears to be a tricky module to get up and running. For those individuals not using drush, or otherwise are having issues getting the OSM Player to work, here's my configuration I just got working. Note that I do not need audio with my video yet, so I've not included the MediaFront Audio module, and it's requirements. When I do add audio support, I'll update this tutorial.

Setup:

Having just spent way too many days debugging my SSL / https configuration, I thought I'd save many of you my headache. Note that there are two Drupal modules that handle this for most people. I, however, was not so lucky. I have suspicions why neither of those modules worked for me, but to really understand the issue requires more time than I'm willing to devote to the issue. The two modules are:

I'm a speaker at DrupalCampLA 2010, with the following as my session topic. However The purpose of this post is to provide a public download link to my PowerPoint slides. (See the attachement to download those slides.)

The Panels module is my favorite method for creating complex page layouts. Apparently, many web site developers using Panels seem to have issues getting layouts with equal heights in their columns. There are at least two easy methods to solve the issue, both of which require understanding a bit about the CSS divs, classes and id Panels creates to contain your Panels columns. This same idea can also be generalized to a method for equalizing the heights of any page elements.

How to Create a Basic Drupal Module

Creating your own Drupal module is quite easy. In this tutorial I’ll walk though the bare essentials of creating a module. Even an ‘empty’ module is useful for web projects, being that they serve as a great place for code snippets, quick experiments with the Drupal API and a place for simple pages.

The basics of using Java Script in Drupal

This is a super-quick tutorial, since I am assuming anyone interested in combining Java Script and Drupal is already familiar with coding. Getting Java Script running in Drupal is just a slight variation from the typical setup; rather than this:

Welcome to another tutorial in my How to Customize a Drupal Web Site series. Previous tutorials in this series include tips on smart searching for Drupal information, how to tell if a Drupal theme supports local modification, how and why you should be creating sub-themes, and how to make changes to a Drupal Theme. In this tutorial, I show how to insert and use PHP in your site’s content, as well as explain the PHP environment this capability provides.

In this super-brief tutorial, I give you the necessary CSS to insert into the appropriate CSS file of your theme to remove that "Homepage" field from the Anonymous Comment input form:

 
   /* hide the homepage field on the comment forms */ 
   #edit-homepage-wrapper { 
        display: none; 
    }

The Problem
For many eCommerce and company web sites, commenting is turned off and customer communications take place away from the public’s eyes simply because “the public” includes spammers and maturity challenged individuals who will post offensive and pornographic materials to a web site’s comments and anywhere else the site allows.

Creating a Privileged Access Content Type

Welcome to the final section of the tutorial on configuring your Drupal site with special access permissions. The first section of this tutorial explains Drupal's permissions and user roles. The second section walks through creating user roles and setting their permissions. The third section covers installing and configuring the Content Access module. In this final section I'll show how to create a new content type, give it special access permissions, and finally rebuild permissions to enable this special configuration.

Welcome to the third section of the tutorial on configuring your Drupal site with restricted access permissions. The first section of this tutorial explains Drupal's permissions and user roles. The second section walks through creating user roles and setting their permissions. In this section, installing and configuring the Content Access module.

Creating User Roles & Setting Permissions

Welcome to the second section of the tutorial on configuring your Drupal site with special access permissions, enabling you to create pages only privileged users can see. The first section of this tutorial explains Drupal's permissions and user roles. If you are new to Drupal, I suggest you read that first. In this section we will create and configure two new user roles.

How to Create Pages Only Customers Can See

Introduction to Configuring Site Access Permissions
If you have a web site providing eCommerce or other professional services, it is a good idea to configure your site with different sections and other pages only available to site members, paying customers and/or your staff. Drupal makes this quite easy, once you know a few concepts that I'll explain shortly. In a few minutes you'll be able to create new content that only specific types of people will be able to see. Another nice feature with Drupal is how such content does not even show up in the menus when someone without permissions to see these pages visits your site.

In this tutorial, the steps are given to configure your Drupal site so “customers” and “staff” have different levels of access and control over what they can do on your site.

The information provided includes:

A general background of Drupal site permissions and user roles,
Creating two new user roles, and the configuration of their permissions
Configuration of the Access Control module
Creating a new content type with special access permissions

How to Make Changes to a Drupal Theme

Welcome to the next sub-tutorial in my How to Customize a Drupal Web Site series. In this sub-tutorial I’ll be showing how to locate places in your theme’s files controlling different aspects of a Drupal page, how to experiment interactively with changes, and how to finalize those changes. If you are just starting with my tutorials, and new with Drupal, I suggest you visit the link above, it goes to where I give an overview of Drupal customization.

A Theme is Drupal’s name for the collection of PHP, CSS, templates, images, and related files that collectively drive the logic for rendering a Drupal web page. Creating a theme is a large and complex topic. However, creating and modifying a sub-theme is ridiculously simple. In this sub-tutorial I will show you step by step how to create a sub-theme, install it, and activate it.

Anyone creating a website with Drupal should be comfortable locating, downloading and installing modules to their site. Locating a theme or module for a particular need is somewhat more difficult, simply because of the large number of themes and modules available. In this sub-tutorial I will outline some generally useful information, such as:

Some tips for smarter searching with Google;
An overview of useful Drupal search terms.

How to Customize a Drupal Web Site

Anyone building a web site will encounter situations where they would like to tweak the display of the web site’s elements, or insert some functional logic they’ve written, located from a friend, or found while researching. Developing a site within Drupal provides several easy techniques for you to accomplish such goals. Depending upon your needs, one of the following should handle your needs for customizing your site.

A Guide to Drupal eCommerce and Site Development

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