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Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce
Posted by
samzenpus
on Monday July 21, @02:16PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "Many Web developers wish to create e-commerce sites that also support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other features that can increase traffic to the sites. But most shopping cart products do not include those capabilities, or, if such third-party add-ons exist, they may be quite limited in functionality. Similarly, most if not all content management systems (CMSs) lack native e-commerce capabilities. Yet that barrier is being overcome, because a handful of e-commerce modules have been created for the most popular CMSs. Perhaps the most promising pairing, at this time, is Drupal and the e-Commerce module — a combination covered in the book Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
| Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce | |
| author | Michael Peacock |
| pages | 264 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 7/10 |
| reviewer | Michael J. Ross |
| ISBN | 1847194060 |
| summary | A thorough guide to the Drupal e-Commerce |
This title was published by Packt Publishing on 31 March 2008, under the ISBNs 1847194060 and 978-1847194060, and is a recent addition to their growing lineup of books focusing on Drupal and Joomla. The firm hosts the book's Web page, where readers can download the sample code, submit feedback, post a question about the book, read an online excerpt, and download a sample chapter (number 8) on "Creating a Better Selling Experience," as a PDF file. In addition, readers can purchase the handy e-book version, which contains everything found in the print version.
The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal and the e-Commerce module, and also explains how to download the two of them, as well as the additional module (Token) upon which the latter depends. The author explains the purpose of each area within Drupal's "Site configuration" section, and what changes the reader should make, if any. Also, he provides the background story for the sample e-commerce Web site that is built throughout the book — in this case, a dinosaur model shop. It should be noted that the diagram on page 6 does an effective job of explaining the basic idea of how a CMS works (better than the similar figures seen in other CMS books), and it is followed by an explanation of what e-commerce is. However, it is doubtful that any developer who purchased this book would need to be told what are CMSs and e-commerce.
In the second chapter, the author briefly reviews the steps for adding content and navigation to a Drupal-powered site, by adding pages and menus, respectively. Also, some additional modules are enabled, for creating a contact form and a blog, for the sample site. Up to this point in the book, readers will have become accustomed to the author explicitly guiding them through the steps necessary for creating the sample site. Thus it may come as a surprise to such readers when they see the second figure on page 40, showing the navigation menu, including new sections for dinosaurs and the museum, and a link to a contact page. The two new sections were briefly mentioned three pages earlier, but the steps for creating them were not; the steps for adding the contact page link were apparently not mentioned anywhere. However, any experienced Drupal developer should have no difficulty figuring out how to add these navigation menu items.
With the third chapter, the book shifts focus from Drupal basics to implementing an e-commerce site. Aspects of running an online business — such as site accessibility laws, legal issues, and privacy laws — are mentioned, though readers outside of the United Kingdom will most likely not be pleased by the UK-centricity of the material. Other topics covered include product types, groupings, details, photos, and advertising, as well as customer service.
In Chapter 4, readers learn about the e-Commerce product types and their corresponding modules, and how to add products to the store catalog — including specialized types of products, such as apparel, services, and bundled products ("parcels"). Chapter 5 briefly covers users, rules, permissions, settings, rules, registration, e-mail messages to users, users' pictures, taxonomy, requiring registration, customer management, user orders, contacting users, and adding your business's staff to your site. It also touches upon taxonomy and how to use it for controlling user access to content. But the author fails to explain why this is needed for the online store. Providing such a rationale up front is especially important when asking readers to work their way through potentially daunting subjects such as taxonomy, and implementing them in their own test sites, if they are following what the author is doing.
The sixth chapter begins with an unneeded review of the themes built into Drupal version 5.x, with even more space taken up describing three red-based color schemes. This is followed by a discussion of how to modify whichever of those themes is enabled, and, very briefly, how to create a new theme. In this chapter and many others, the author frequently reminds us that the hypothetical client, Doug of Doug's Dinos, is "really pleased" with the "great looking site." Readers can judge for themselves just how great is the site's design. Admittedly, in a book such as this that does not focus on Web design, a sample site can be quite basic. But the constant praise is unwarranted.
Allowing customer checkout and payment are critical to any e-commerce site, and those topics are explored in Chapter 7. The topic coverage is fairly complete, though occasionally the author does not make clear where in the Drupal administration section the reader will find the particular topic under discussion, e.g., the global anonymous purchase policy. Chapter 8 offers a lot of valuable information, including how to: add shopping cart and search elements to every page, automatically create user accounts, add images to product listings, offer discounts based on customer role, provide coupons, allow bulk purchasing, set up auction and donation products, and automatically adjust charge prices based on various conditions.
Chapter 9 delves into the particulars of calculating taxes and shipping costs, as well as accepting payments through various gateways, including PayPal, which is explored in detail. The only part that will be misleading to readers, is the claim that PayPal's IPN "pings" your server for each customer transaction. Actually, their server does not ping yours, but instead posts transaction data that you can use for updating your online database.
Chapter 10 presents a number of modules and techniques for making an e-commerce site more secure, and also covers domain name, Web hosting, and site maintenance issues. The security modules discussed are definitely worth considering. Some readers may be confused by the Backups section of cPanel mentioned by the author, since not all cPanel installations offer it.
The last two chapters of the book address invoicing, CRM, and marketing one's site. The discussions of search engine optimization, viral marketing, newsletters, etc., are quite cursory, and readers interested in those topics would fare better by consulting books, online articles, and other resources that are much more thorough. The chapter's topic that will probably be of most value to e-commerce developers, is the demonstration of how to significantly customize the layout of invoices, using CSS. The book's sole appendix explains how to install WampServer.
All the chapters conclude with brief summaries, which, without exception, are a waste of space — especially considering the brevity of most of the chapters. The old oratory principle of "tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them" may be terrific for speeches, but not for books. That is primarily because someone in an audience listening to a live speech does not have the luxury of looking into the past to hear a portion of the speech again, nor of looking into the future to anticipate what the speaker will say next. Readers of books, on the other hand, can of course jump backward and forward quickly to review or preview material, as needed.
The quality of the book's writing is noticeably weak, with countless awkward phrases and run-on sentences. Some are downright puzzling, e.g., "Thanks for your custom!" (page 125); did the author mean "order?" Throughout the book, one finds a remarkable underuse of commas, frequent mixing up of "that" and "which," misplacement of commas and parentheses, misuse of commas in place of semicolons and even periods (e.g., page 124), semicolons in place of colons, and missing hyphens from adjective phrases. Most noticeable — and at times laughable — is the excessive use of exclamation marks, reflecting a common misconception that they jazz up otherwise dull material. For example, page 49 contains three completely unnecessary exclamation marks, not counting the two contained within a customer testimonial. In addition, the book contains several errata, such as: "loose" (should read "lose"; pages 8 and 195), "leads customers" (should read "leads to customers"; page 57), "products" (should read "product's"; page 62), "customers' role" (should read "customers' roles"; page 88), "to mentioned" (should read "to mention"; page 131), "its does" (page 159), "If a more" (should read "If more"; page 202), "businesses" (should read "business's"; page 221), and many more.
An additional blemish of the book, albeit minor, is that there is little consistency in how the author describes to the reader the navigation steps for going to a particular area of Drupal administration. Sometimes he presents a breadcrumb-style menu path, starting with the highest level menu item. (The majority of readers would probably find this to be the most logical format.) On other occasions, he reverses the order and describes it narratively. Least useful is his listing of the URL, such as "http://localhost/drupal-5.7/admin/users/roles," which may not even match the Drupal root URL that the reader has set up in their development environment.
Despite the aforementioned problems, Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a welcome addition to the growing list of more specialized Drupal titles, and is currently the premier resource for anyone who wishes to use Drupal and the e-Commerce module for creating a virtual store.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The first chapter serves as an introduction to Drupal and the e-Commerce module, and also explains how to download the two of them, as well as the additional module (Token) upon which the latter depends. The author explains the purpose of each area within Drupal's "Site configuration" section, and what changes the reader should make, if any. Also, he provides the background story for the sample e-commerce Web site that is built throughout the book — in this case, a dinosaur model shop. It should be noted that the diagram on page 6 does an effective job of explaining the basic idea of how a CMS works (better than the similar figures seen in other CMS books), and it is followed by an explanation of what e-commerce is. However, it is doubtful that any developer who purchased this book would need to be told what are CMSs and e-commerce.
In the second chapter, the author briefly reviews the steps for adding content and navigation to a Drupal-powered site, by adding pages and menus, respectively. Also, some additional modules are enabled, for creating a contact form and a blog, for the sample site. Up to this point in the book, readers will have become accustomed to the author explicitly guiding them through the steps necessary for creating the sample site. Thus it may come as a surprise to such readers when they see the second figure on page 40, showing the navigation menu, including new sections for dinosaurs and the museum, and a link to a contact page. The two new sections were briefly mentioned three pages earlier, but the steps for creating them were not; the steps for adding the contact page link were apparently not mentioned anywhere. However, any experienced Drupal developer should have no difficulty figuring out how to add these navigation menu items.
With the third chapter, the book shifts focus from Drupal basics to implementing an e-commerce site. Aspects of running an online business — such as site accessibility laws, legal issues, and privacy laws — are mentioned, though readers outside of the United Kingdom will most likely not be pleased by the UK-centricity of the material. Other topics covered include product types, groupings, details, photos, and advertising, as well as customer service.
In Chapter 4, readers learn about the e-Commerce product types and their corresponding modules, and how to add products to the store catalog — including specialized types of products, such as apparel, services, and bundled products ("parcels"). Chapter 5 briefly covers users, rules, permissions, settings, rules, registration, e-mail messages to users, users' pictures, taxonomy, requiring registration, customer management, user orders, contacting users, and adding your business's staff to your site. It also touches upon taxonomy and how to use it for controlling user access to content. But the author fails to explain why this is needed for the online store. Providing such a rationale up front is especially important when asking readers to work their way through potentially daunting subjects such as taxonomy, and implementing them in their own test sites, if they are following what the author is doing.
The sixth chapter begins with an unneeded review of the themes built into Drupal version 5.x, with even more space taken up describing three red-based color schemes. This is followed by a discussion of how to modify whichever of those themes is enabled, and, very briefly, how to create a new theme. In this chapter and many others, the author frequently reminds us that the hypothetical client, Doug of Doug's Dinos, is "really pleased" with the "great looking site." Readers can judge for themselves just how great is the site's design. Admittedly, in a book such as this that does not focus on Web design, a sample site can be quite basic. But the constant praise is unwarranted.
Allowing customer checkout and payment are critical to any e-commerce site, and those topics are explored in Chapter 7. The topic coverage is fairly complete, though occasionally the author does not make clear where in the Drupal administration section the reader will find the particular topic under discussion, e.g., the global anonymous purchase policy. Chapter 8 offers a lot of valuable information, including how to: add shopping cart and search elements to every page, automatically create user accounts, add images to product listings, offer discounts based on customer role, provide coupons, allow bulk purchasing, set up auction and donation products, and automatically adjust charge prices based on various conditions.
Chapter 9 delves into the particulars of calculating taxes and shipping costs, as well as accepting payments through various gateways, including PayPal, which is explored in detail. The only part that will be misleading to readers, is the claim that PayPal's IPN "pings" your server for each customer transaction. Actually, their server does not ping yours, but instead posts transaction data that you can use for updating your online database.
Chapter 10 presents a number of modules and techniques for making an e-commerce site more secure, and also covers domain name, Web hosting, and site maintenance issues. The security modules discussed are definitely worth considering. Some readers may be confused by the Backups section of cPanel mentioned by the author, since not all cPanel installations offer it.
The last two chapters of the book address invoicing, CRM, and marketing one's site. The discussions of search engine optimization, viral marketing, newsletters, etc., are quite cursory, and readers interested in those topics would fare better by consulting books, online articles, and other resources that are much more thorough. The chapter's topic that will probably be of most value to e-commerce developers, is the demonstration of how to significantly customize the layout of invoices, using CSS. The book's sole appendix explains how to install WampServer.
All the chapters conclude with brief summaries, which, without exception, are a waste of space — especially considering the brevity of most of the chapters. The old oratory principle of "tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them" may be terrific for speeches, but not for books. That is primarily because someone in an audience listening to a live speech does not have the luxury of looking into the past to hear a portion of the speech again, nor of looking into the future to anticipate what the speaker will say next. Readers of books, on the other hand, can of course jump backward and forward quickly to review or preview material, as needed.
The quality of the book's writing is noticeably weak, with countless awkward phrases and run-on sentences. Some are downright puzzling, e.g., "Thanks for your custom!" (page 125); did the author mean "order?" Throughout the book, one finds a remarkable underuse of commas, frequent mixing up of "that" and "which," misplacement of commas and parentheses, misuse of commas in place of semicolons and even periods (e.g., page 124), semicolons in place of colons, and missing hyphens from adjective phrases. Most noticeable — and at times laughable — is the excessive use of exclamation marks, reflecting a common misconception that they jazz up otherwise dull material. For example, page 49 contains three completely unnecessary exclamation marks, not counting the two contained within a customer testimonial. In addition, the book contains several errata, such as: "loose" (should read "lose"; pages 8 and 195), "leads customers" (should read "leads to customers"; page 57), "products" (should read "product's"; page 62), "customers' role" (should read "customers' roles"; page 88), "to mentioned" (should read "to mention"; page 131), "its does" (page 159), "If a more" (should read "If more"; page 202), "businesses" (should read "business's"; page 221), and many more.
An additional blemish of the book, albeit minor, is that there is little consistency in how the author describes to the reader the navigation steps for going to a particular area of Drupal administration. Sometimes he presents a breadcrumb-style menu path, starting with the highest level menu item. (The majority of readers would probably find this to be the most logical format.) On other occasions, he reverses the order and describes it narratively. Least useful is his listing of the URL, such as "http://localhost/drupal-5.7/admin/users/roles," which may not even match the Drupal root URL that the reader has set up in their development environment.
Despite the aforementioned problems, Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a welcome addition to the growing list of more specialized Drupal titles, and is currently the premier resource for anyone who wishes to use Drupal and the e-Commerce module for creating a virtual store.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Already slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Already slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
And wouldn't you know it -- http://127.0.0.1/drupal-5.7/admin/users/roles [127.0.0.1] is down too!
Reply to This
Parent
old hat (Score:4, Informative)
I question the relevance of a book written about outdated, unsupported ecommerce tech.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about?
Drupals current stable releases are 6.3 and 5.8.
I, and probably many others, would appreciate you mention at least some of all those missing features in Drupal 5.8.
I have been involved in several e-commerce sites developed with Drupal 5.8 and UberCart ( http://www.ubercart.org/ [ubercart.org] ) and we really don't find much functionality missing. Actually, the Drupal API ( http://api.drupal.org/ [drupal.org] ) and available modules is far beyond anything else I've worked with.
Drupal + UberCart is really real
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole problem with Drupal (well, the main problem, every popular software of any size is going to have lots of problems) is the project leads' refusal to make any kind of real API. With every major release of Drupal, modules become orphaned and existing sites get harder to support or upgrade. Because Drupal uses a "hook" system, and PHP (with no data typing), and there are no unit tests, it's really, really, really difficult to tell when things are broken. I've seen evidence of this again and again as e
Ubercart (Score:3, Informative)
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using it for a small e-commerce site, and it's by far the best online store I didn't write from scratch. From and end-user perspective, it's very easy to use.
What made me initially choose Ubercart over Drupal e-commerce is the checkout process. Two easy features that really can make or break the store: shipping estimate on the cart page (BEFORE entering any personal information besides postal code/country), and not presenting checkout as having to "sign up" for an account (even though the only dif
Yet Another Drupal Module Not Ready For 6.0 (Score:2)
YADMNRF6 ? If I expended effort to come up with a funny acroynym. ... and congrats to the LDAP module for finally getting an Alpha out yesterday (July 20th) for 6.0.
Why is 6 so hard to code for? Why is the enterprise module development so lagging?
Re: (Score:2)
Drupal internals don't adhere to standard design patterns... its a mess and hard to program for at any version unless you have deep knowledge of the way it works.
My experience with D4 and D5 is that the contrib modules typically lag behind the core by about one year. I don't plan to touch D6 for another 6 months or so.
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't the module API supposed to be stabilised / standardised at one point (with 6.x or 7.x maybe) ?
This has been a long standing problem and was supposed to be addressed.
I don't care if it's good or not (Score:5, Funny)
I don't want to know anything about a product that makes me think of tall black drag queens.
Reminds me of a funny conversation with a friend who doesn't follow politics closely.
friend: Man, I don't think the Dems have any good candidates running this year.
me: Yeah, but i know you won't go Republican.
friend: Hell, no! But there's one guy they all seem to be going on about, who is it, Rupal?
me: I think you're thinking about Ron Paul.
friend: What's the difference?
me: One's a tall, black drag queen, the other is a fringe libertarian candidate.
friend: Heh. What are the chances of either of them getting the nomination?
me: About the same.
Reply to This
Integrated fraud? (Score:2)
Social networking, content management, Web 2.0, and e-commerce in the same program! Think of the fraud opportunities!
"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and us!"
Don't buld your own e-commerce site. Just don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bite-the-bullet and pay one of the companies that specializes in e-commerce to do this for you. They have already worked out all kinds of issues that you don't even know exist. You and your customers will be MUCH happier.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:2)
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In my country people prefer to pay by bank wire before the shipment. As such, there's no payment section in the stores. Another popular option is COD payment. The upside: web stores are straightforward. Downside: the e-commerce software written in the US is completely out of whack, because it assumes people will pay using credit cards or money transfer services. I whipped up my own web store, because removing things from Drupal or Magento or Zencart would take more time than writing it from scratch, and wou
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Drupal is my favorite open source CMS. Despite legitimate critiques it is an amazingly engineered piece of software; the customizability is unparalleled for a such a capable out-of-the-box package. Drupal makes many projects possible which would otherwise not be possible at all. Unfortunately Drupal is no panacea because all of this costs in terms of complexity.
No, this is why you use a framework. A
A review of the review (Score:5, Insightful)
The review seems pre-occupied with errors that were missed by the editors that do not reflect the quality (or lack thereof) of the writing itself. While the reviewer does touch on some serious issues (awkward phrases, run-on sentences), using over 10% of a review to harp on editorial gaffes is a waste of space. This is especially true considering that some of the "mistakes" are not mistakes at all, but instead, use of British English instead of American English. "Thanks for your custom!" is perfectly acceptable in England, it is equivalent to saying "Thanks for your business!" in the US.
In short, grammar Nazism doesn't belong in a book review, other than perhaps making a slight mention of it. I'm also very curious as to whether the review read a review copy, or a retail copy. Review copies are frequently filled with errors that will be caught later during final copy editing.
Reply to This
Another alternative in django - Satchmo (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, I'm one of the developers but I figured I'd chime in with some alternatives if you don't like the current PHP-based offerings.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've never heard of Drupal before. Is this another flavor of the month software package?
No, I wouldn't call it that.
Its one of the larger and more popular open source CMS systems.
It is fairly widely deployed and used, and usually shows up in any comparison or discussion of current CMS options from the last few years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No it is actually a pretty major CMS. If you have no interest in Content Management Systems then it is very possible that you wouldn't hear about it.
Re: (Score:2)
ha, no, certainly not. I for one have been using it as my main CMS since 2004.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I've never heard of this Google.com
Is it some sort of startup web directory?
Hrm, maybe I'll look it up on Alta Vista. No, that would be a waste of time, as I pay per-minute for AOL dialup access. Grr, if Granny would just get off the phone first!
Maybe post a embarrassingly lazy question on the newsgroups! I'll make other people do all this searching for me! There's an endless supply of well-intentioned fools willing to coddle me! There's no downside!