Drupal Commerce Presentation at DrupalCon Denver
This is a live blog of “Drupal Commerce: eCommerce any way you need it” by Ryan Szrama at DrupalCon Denver.
You can read our full tutorial on Drupal Commerce here.
Introduction
eCommerce is a hot topic on the web and for Drupal sites its no different. The Commerce Guys, who develop Drupal Commerce, just received $5 million in funding.
After Drupal 6 and Ubercart, they decided to start fresh and Drupal Commerce is the result. The Commerce Guys are based in Paris and Jackson MI. Their passion is to help people succeed with e-commerce – “Powering truly flexible commerce.”
Samples:
- http://www.ioby.org
- http://sosense.org – Your Social Impact. – using Drupal Commerce they built their donation system without writing any code at all.
- Eurocentres – 250,000 products – 1200 rules that determine the price for something… (now that’s incredible.
- http://www.ticketcake.com – event ticket management.
- http://www.coles2u.co.uk – how much it costs to get coal delivered to your door.
*note* – creating a great drupal commerce site requires a very good understanding of the Rules module.
“Couple a free-style, unconstrained approach to eCommerce with the strengths of Drupal as a social and community building tool, and you have something very powerful on your hands.” – Mike Smith – Zoocha – http://www.countryside.co.uk
Drupal Commerce is an eCommerce framework, focusing on what you can build with it – not simply what you can do with it out of the box. Its very much like a box of lego blocks that you get to build with…
What would you do if you had $5,000,000? – Make Drupal Commerce more accessible
What do they intend to do between now and August 2012 at DrupalCon Munich?
- Revamp DrupalCommerce.org
- Relaunch Commerce Kickstart to be a more polished point of entry for new users
- Build a Drupal Commerce development and communication team to work with Ryan
- Provide and accessible team of experts to eCommerce integrators and train their teams on Drupal Commerce
Demo Time
Ryan installed Drupal Commerce kickstart in about 60 seconds. – It installed Drupal core, commerce core and a number of contributed modules. Its very bare bones…
The Pineapple Store
It took Ryan 3 hours to build the site and a week to theme it… 🙂 But this is pretty much kickstart – with a couple of extra modules.
Some Features out of the box
- Dynamic Add to Cart button
- Field widgets get shown (Product attributes) based on any number of product variations. While there might be 12 products – they are automatically brought together on a page based on options.
- Views of all products
- You can add fields to a view and tie them to the cart item (like additional information
- Checkout form is built using drag and drop form builder
- The shipping module will let you define any number of options – then use rules to determine which is appropriate.
- Final price is always broken down on the last page before payment
- Multiple instances of payment methods
- Admin notification of sale, account creation etc out of the box. – all based on Rules.
- Rules govern pretty much how everything works…. (hence – the need to really understand Rules)
Great presentation from Ryan on Drupal Commerce – a very powerful eCommerce platform based on Drupal.