Installing a Drupal theme
After you have decided the best theme to go along with your online store, you should follow these steps to install it. This is a rather straightforward procedure, very similar to the one performed in Chapter 2, Installation of Drupal and Ubercart, during module installations 1. We will go through installing the second most popular Drupal theme according to Drupal.org statistics. Go to http drupal. org proj ect acquia_marina and click on the download link next to the 6.X-1.9 version. By jwolf on...
Characteristics and advantages of Zen theme
According to its creators, Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal, and this is the truth. It is appropriate not only for the site administrator who wants to create a new simple subtheme, but also for the advanced developer who needs to create a complex theme for a large portal. It uses standards-compliant and semantically correct XHTML code and allows the creation of a new subtheme, just by copying some files, changing their basic information, and editing a CSS file. The main advantages...
Summary Aia
In this chapter, we have discussed all the best practices and workflows that should be followed in order to achieve higher efficiency for your business back-office administration. Being consistent on your deliveries and your packaging policies will help you build a reliable profile among your customers and always provide high service standards. Keep in mind that shipments is an area most online stores have problems with, so opt for solid returns and lost item policies in advance. Furthermore,...
Search e gin optimizatio
You have many ways to promote your website, but the main traffic source will always be search engines. Search engine optimization helps your site to improve its position in the natural search results, thus generating more traffic and attracting visitors who search for your products. Our guide for the search optimization process will be the amazing Drupal SEO Checklist module. As its name suggests, it doesn't add any new functionality to our site, but it suggests useful modules and checks that...
Twitter account
Twitter is gaining more and more publicity these days. Recent Twitter list's features will add up to the hype and make user diffusion more rapid. The idea of having a business account in Twitter and exercising corporate blogging and Twitter posts is appealing to a wider audience, especially in the age group of 15-45. The Twitter module provides out-of-the-box API integration with the Twitter microblogging service. Another common practice in social media-aware sites is to use site-wide blocks...
Basic principles when choosing a theme
Choosing a theme for your online shop is not an easy task. Moreover, it can be even harder considering that you want to promote specific items from your catalog, you need to change first page items often, and you need to rapidly communicate offers and loyalty policies and other business-related stuff. Ubercart-specific themes mostly target the following special areas You should keep these layout regions in mind, while going through the following section on theme selection. Before you search for...
Themespecific configuration
Next to the Global settings subtab is a list of enabled themes. On a new installation, only Garland will be listed. Select Garland for now. At this moment, you should feel free to experiment. General Settings These are the settings concerning visibility of certain UI elements. Mission Statement This option lets you choose where to display your mission statement. Breadcrumb This option lets you choose whether or not to display a breadcrumb trail. If you have a product catalog, this is a very...
Customers
Under Customer reports, you can view customers and end users of your site. For each customer account you'll be able to view the following elements The billing or shipping name depending on preference The total number of orders placed by the account The total number of products ordered The total revenue produced for the store The average amount of revenue the customer has produced for each order You can easily navigate to each customer order by clicking on customer names. In the same logic,...
Invoicing
Invoicing is a very common action and also an inevitable part of the order procedure. You cannot sell anything without providing your customer with an invoice, no matter which place on the planet he or she is buying from. Navigate to Home Administer Store administration Orders Order Invoice. The Invoice screen is fully configurable and holds all the purchase data. You can either see the invoice document in rich HTML view or print view. In addition, you have the option to mail it directly to...
Cart settings WiWW Edit
http www. i nfowu nders. g r dru p ai-6.13 ca rt Ttie minimum subtotal is iO.OD o Anonymous cart duration is 4 hours o Authenticated cart duration is 1 years Continue shopping link isr Continue shopping 0 Not using a custom cart breadcrumb. o gt efauIt cart form is enabled. PayPal Express Checkout is disabled, o Google Checkout is enabled, o Shipping quotes 5 disabled. o Cart biock is shown when empty. Cart block is collapsed by default. Hetp text is not shown in block. In the Add to cart...
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Table of Contents
Chapter 2 Installation of Drupal and Ubercart_17 Minimum requirements for Ubercart installation 18 Creating a local environment using a web server, PHP, Using a commercial hosting service 24 Downloading and installing Drupal 26 Downloading and installing all the required Drupal modules 31 Downloading and installing Ubercart 33 Using UberDrupal, an Ubercart installation profile 36 General view of the administration page 39 Chapter 4 Managing Categories, Products, and Attributes_69 Creating...
The Hotel Booking block
Now that you have created the room types and defined all the details, you have to enable the room booking functionality for your clients. Go to Home Administer Site building Blocks, and enable the block named Hotel Booking Search Widget. There, the visitor selects the Check-In Date, the nights of stay, the number of guests that are Adults and Children, and whether he or she wants a smoking or non-smoking room, and then clicks on Search. During the next step, the visitor can see a list of all...
Creating and managing products
So, now that you have completed the customization of your vocabularies and inserted your terms, you are ready to create your first product. For Drupal engine, new content types are nothing more than nodes with extra fields in this approach a new product is only another content type, with some special properties created by the Ubercart module. So, if you have previous Drupal experience, creating a new product is just a piece of cake, but if you don't, just carry out the following steps carefully...
for Ubercart
Ubercart can now be used for hotel bookings, thanks to the Hotel Booking System for Ubercart. To install it, browse to http drupal.org project uc_hotel. After you download the module unzip it, and upload it to your site's sites all modules folder. Now go to Administer Site building Modules to enable it. To configure it, go to Home Administer Store administration Hotel Booking. Here you can set up all the options for your hotel using several available tabs as follows Base Rates Here, you can...
Basic tax rate configuration
By now you have a fully functional online shop, very competitive prices for your merchandise, and a business plan that predicts orders from all over the world. You also went through all the shipping configurations, so the next step you have to take is to start dealing with tax rates. When it comes to setting up rate calculation for your online store, you should take into account a great many factors that can integrate with your existing business logic. Fortunately, Ubercart from version 2.0...
Site building
With this section, you can customize your site by using its different functions, such as blocks, menus, and so on Blocks Blocks are units of code, used to display content in specific regions of your site. Usually, they are created either by the installed modules or when you add a new menu, but the site administrator can also create a block from scratch. In the Blocks page, you can add a new block, configure a block, assign a block to a region, or delete a block. We'll take a closer look at...
Viewing orders 1
When it comes to order monitoring and tracking, Ubercart provides the end user with advanced reporting services with a vast amount of statistical information and order data. To access this screen navigate to Home Administer Store administration Orders. From this point on, you can perform actions like sorting the order list, by clicking on column names and choosing between ascending and descending ordering. In addition, you have extra search criteria like order statuses and order numbers. This...
Viewing order auditing trail logs
As we have mentioned before, a good and well-structured auditing system will sustain proper operation and order fulfillment in the long term. To view all past log actions for a specific order navigate to Home Administer Store administration Orders Order Logs. Home gt Administer gt Store administration Order status changed From In checkout to Pending. c PayPal payment for 226.99 entered by 1. c Order status changed from Pending to Payment received.
Ubercart reports
We do not have to stress the importance of good trend and sales monitoring for the fructification for your online business. Ubercart comes with a full-feature reporting engine based on Drupal views. To access these reports, navigate to the Administer Store administration Reports screen. Because Ubertcart's reporting engine depends directly on Drupal's embedded reporting system, you need to activate the Drupal Reports core module. To do so, you should browse to Administer Store administration...
Click on Save configuration
Now select the second tab, Cart panes. Here, you can select the individual panes that create the cart view page. You need at least the Default cart form, but for your store let's enable all four available panes, which are related to shipping and payments. Click on Save configuration. Home - Administer gt Store administration gt Configuration gt Cart settings Cart settings j Cart block Save configuration Reset to defaults Select the third tab, Cart block. Click on Click here to go to the...
Click on Save configuration 1
Home AaministEr gt Score administration gt Configuration The taxonomy vocabulary csiatog is set as the product caialdg. Catalog breadcrumb is being displayed. Node count Is not being displayed In the catalog breadcrumb. The catalog view Is displaying subcategories. Subcategories are being displayed in 3 columns. There are 12 product nodes displayed per page. Block settings Slock title Is not pointing to the top-level catalog page. Not expanding categories in the catalog block. Tie number of...
Changing basic elements
Every Drupal theme using the template engine produces HTML code from Drupal core objects. Therefore, some content of the final HTML code generated is actually site-wide property such as site slogan, mission, and site name. We will have to change Drupal default settings and provide our business details. To do this, go to Home Administer Site configuration and edit the fields as we describe next. If you do not want to provide specific information, for instance if you do not have a corporate...
Modules used in Chapter
In Chapter 2, we download and install Drupal, Ubercart, and all of the basic modules required to support or enhance our Drupal Ubercart e-store features. Some of these are Token allows other modules to place small bits of text into specific placeholders. Jeff Eaton, Greg Knaddison, Mike Ryan The Content Construction Kit is one of the most important modules in Drupal 6. It allows the creation of custom fields for every content type from the user interface. Karen Stevenson, Marc Ferran, Moshe...
Budget Tpn
Trying to provide a rough estimation about the cost of a custom theme is not straightforward and depends on a number of factors. The bare minimum for an extremely basic, single-page design would be a few hundred dollars. The average cost for a small business site design plus Drupal theme would be in the lower range of thousands. This can vary widely due to things like number of unique pages, whether or not Drupal module support required, if you need a logo, and so on, but hopefully that gives...
Products
Switching over to the product reports, you will be able to view all products on your site. This view provides the most important information about each product information such as product name, model, number of views, amount of product sold, revenue produced for the store, and the gross revenue each product has contributed to the shop's total. In the case where your products have attributes and model or SKU adjustments, each product details will be broken down by model or SKU name.
Creating package option
Packaging is another step for creating the order. Packaging depends on the availability of your products, the estimated delivery time, and the mutual relevance of the products to be shipped. To define a packaging policy for an order, go to Home Administer Store administration Orders Order Packages. This makes perfect sense as we can only define packages among items in the same order. Home Administer gt Store administration gt . Orders gt Order 6 Packages Organize products into packages. Package...
Newsletters
Newsletters are a very powerful sales tool, which helps you interact with inactive customers and establish a sense of continuous activity to the end user. Composing and sending newsletters aligned with the current time frame and context can raise your credibility to end customers. For instance, to achieve frequent communication with your customers, you may compose and send newsletters for the autumn sales period one for Christmas holiday deals, and another one later on just before the summer...
ColorZilla
ColorZilla is also a Firefox extension. It provides useful tools related to color management, such as eyedropper, color picker, or palette viewer. You can download it from http www. colorzilla. com f irefox . Click on Install ColorZilla. A new window opens with a warning about possible malicious software, like we saw in the Firebug installation, so click on Install now and then Restart Firefox. When Firefox restarts, ColorZilla is enabled. You can activate it by clicking on the little...
Merging orders
There is no default procedure for merging orders in Ubercart. We may come across such requirements because in the case of online stores, often it so happens that a user places another order after a gap of few days or they may be having second thoughts about a product they are searching for and eventually buy it. In this case, you have to erase one of the two orders and then add the extra products to the other. This is the only way to make a single transaction and perform only one packaging...
Google Checkout Create account customize connect with Ubercart manage
Google Checkout is the new kid on the block when it comes to payment gateways. It is being marketed with competitive commission policies in order to position the service highly in the market and the brand name of Google as the supportive and reliable partner that everyone would want to have. To configure Google Checkout you will need to install the appropriate payment gateway implementation module uc_google_checkout. You can find it at http drupal.org project uc_google_checkout.
Internet marketing
A website without proper marketing is doomed to fail. No matter how high is the quality of your products or how low are your prices, if your potential clients don't know that you exist, your store will have very few visitors. In this section, we'll show how to implement some simple, but very important marketing strategies, aimed at promoting your store and attracting new and targeted visitors. This module allows you to share your content in the most popular networking sites, such as Facebook,...
Site configuration
In this section, there are many options, allowing you to customize every detail of your store. Most of them are created by Drupal installation but many modules add new options to site configuration page. There's no need to explore all of them right now, so we'll show you how to customize only the critical ones. Date and time In this page, you can make some basic adjustments about how Drupal handles date and time. You can select the default time zone, depending on where your store is located....
Preface
Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal. Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal's major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community website. It can be used to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, and to enable complex interactions with Drupal through various add-on...
Adding line item amount
Adding a new line item from a customer request you got through e-mail or a phone call should be your routine from now on. To complete this task, go to the order view screen Home Administer Store administration Orders and, to view the order you want to change, click on the Add a line item button. You will see a screen similar to the one seen in the following screenshot and you'll be prompted to enter an explanatory description for the charge and a valid amount Amount Of the line item without a...
Selecting payment methods
Choosing the appropriate payment method for your business is not a trivial task. The golden rule the more the better in most cases can confuse the customer and redirect load to your customer support center. In general, you should use one credit card processing method along with redirect payment methods like PayPal Checkout and or Google Checkout. For instance, if you are accepting PayPal payments from your PayPal account holders, credit card charging can be handled by your configured account in...
Improving performance
For the first weeks after you launch your new store, you don't have to worry about your site performance, because you will have few visitors. As the days go by, you'll see that traffic increases. Maybe an advertisement or an article in the local newspaper will cause a peak in you site's visitors are you sure that your store is prepared to handle it In this section, you will see how to improve the performance of your website and make it work faster using less resources. Keep in mind though, that...
Sales and price administration
Offering discounts and special prices to selected users is a move that will make your clients love your store even more and boost your sales. Fortunately, there are some very useful modules for Ubercart that will add this extra functionality to your store. To install the Discounts module, browse to http drupal.org project uc_discounts_alt and right after you download the module upload it and unzip it to your site's sites all modules folder, and go to Administer Site building Modules to enable...
Analyzing payment settings
The Payments settings page contains three sections Payment settings, Payment methods, and Payment gateways, as shown in the following screenshot Home gt Administer Store administration gt Configuration Payment tracking is enabled. Payments can be deleted by users with permission. Log payments are being entered to and deleted from the order log. Default payment details message is Continue with checkout to complete payment. PayPal Website Payments Standard is enabled for checkout. PayPal Express...
Creating a theme from scratch using the Zen theme
In the previous section, we showed you the easy way to install and customize a ready-made theme. This solution is good enough for many shop owners, but if you want to use a unique design for your store, the only solution is to build a theme from scratch. We are going to use the Zen Theme, maybe the most popular theme for Drupal. Zen is actually not just a simple theme, but rather a theming framework, because it allows the creation of subthemes. Using a subtheme, we can use all of the great code...
Apply for Website Payments Pro
To apply for Website Payments Pro follow these steps 1. Go to PayPal at http www.paypal.com. 2. Click on the Merchant services tab. 3. Click on Website Payments Pro U.S. Only . 5. Fill in your information, and submit your application. Approval takes between 24 and 48 hours. 6. Once approved, accept the Pro billing agreement. Check the Getting started section on the upper left of your account overview page. First-party authentication Register API signature 1. Log in to your PayPal account and...
Using the product browser of Ubercart Go to Home Administer Store
products of your store. You can select a product and then edit it. It provides basic functionality and it's not very useful for a large number of products. Using the content management feature of Drupal Go to Home Administer Content management Content. Here, you can see not only your products, but all the content of the site, including pages, blog posts, and so on. You can filter the results by status, content type, or category and use combined filters to refine your search. This is probably...
Theme global settings
In every fresh Drupal installation, Garland is enabled as the default theme. Click on the Configure tab next to List, and you will see the global settings for themes. Apparently these settings apply to all themes. On this screen, you can configure the following options Toggle display It handles visibility for specific page elements. You have to configure them in the Site configuration page first, see previous section . Logo image settings If toggled on, the following logo will be displayed. You...
Migrating an HTML theme to a Drupa template
After all these previous discussions, we are now ready to address some more sophisticated XHTML and CSS issues. In this section, we will tackle the problem of converting an existing XHTML CSS template that you may have purchased or created in the past in a Drupal theme. The good news is that what we will describe here is a process of just a few minutes, and it will make your site up and ready for a mockup demo and put it at an 80 -completed level. The bad news is that the remaining 20 may take...
Importing products from text files
Inserting products by hand is an acceptable method if you have only a few products in your store. But what happens if you have hundreds, or even thousands of products This method is time-consuming and not very productive for large stores. Consider that, if you have 10,000 products and it takes only five minutes to insert a single product, you need about five working months to complete the procedure. And you'll also have to face problems such as slow Internet connection or typing errors. That's...
PayPal account setup instructions
Here we will set up a verified PayPal Business Account. Store owners who don't have a PayPal account should follow these steps 1. Go to PayPal at http www. paypal. com. 3. Set up an account for business owners. Input your regional data and business information. Do not forget that you should have a US-based address associated with your credit card to go for the PayPal Pro services. 4. Follow the instructions on the PayPal site. At the end, choose a password and two security questions for the...
Installing Zen theme
The first step is to install Zen theme. The procedure is exactly the same as with every other Drupal theme. 1. Go to http www.drupal.org project zen and download the latest release for Drupal 6. 2. Unzip the file and upload it to the sites all themes folder of your site. 3. Go to Administer Site Building Themes. 4. There, you will see three new available themes Zen, which is the default theme Zen Classic, which is a ready-made Zen subtheme in blue color and Zen Themer's Starter Kit, which is...
Basic Configuration
After having installed our Drupal site and all the required modules, now it's time to start configuring the platform as well as our online shop. In the first part we are going to see how to set up Drupal, and in the second part we are going to check all the configuration options in the store administrator section of Ubercart. The topics we will discuss in this chapter are It's true that Drupal isn't the easiest CMS system in the world, especially for new users with no programming experience....
Payment settings 1
These are the basic settings for your payment system as shown in the following screenshot. The first three checkboxes refer to two systems in place to track payment information. If the first box is checked, a ledger is kept for each order showing payments received refunded along with the current balance for each order. If the second box is checked, you may grant permission for people to delete payment lines from these ledgers in the event of mistakes. The third checkbox makes sure that payment...
Creating and customizing a Zen subtheme
Creating a Zen subtheme is a standard process with specific steps. If you just want to add some simple colors by using CSS, or if you plan to slice and convert a PSD file to a complex Drupal theme, the process is almost the same. You have to create a Zen subtheme and make all the modifications there. There is a simple question that we hear all the time Why do we have to create a Zen subtheme, isn't it simpler to just edit the files of Zen theme Well, maybe it's the easiest path, but you may...