One of the most powerful things that you can do to a Drupal site is to add Drupal Commerce. With some modules and a bit of time, you can transform any Drupal 7 site into a revenue generation engine — no matter if you are selling physical products, file downloads, or just wanting to monetize digital content or access. The ability to simply enable commerce on an existing site is very powerful and can open up opportunities that you might not have considered.
One of those possibilities is paid content. This post will walk you through adding paid content to an existing blog site using two modules from our Digital Commerce Suite: Commerce License (CL) and Commerce License Billing (CLB). At DrupalCon 2014 in Austin, in the second half of Commerce by Example, we walked through the process of setting up a blog. The instructions and the demo site archive are here (link above) so you can walk through at your own pace.
We are happy to have you taking a look with us on the Drupal Commerce by Example. It's a Lab at Drupalcon Austin. We will be updating this post with a video once it's available.
Commerce Bundles, while very powerful, isn’t exactly the most user-friendly from a UI standpoint. However, it is very customizable and there are a few things we can do really easily to improve the overall experience:
Using a View for the Bundle Item Autocomplete
Out of the box, Commerce Bundle’s Bundle Item Autocomplete looks solely at the title. This doesn’t scale really well if you give all of your products in a set (e.g. S-XXL shirts) the same name, which is pretty common. So instead, we can modify the widget to use a custom view to load and search for autocomplete suggestions. To enable:
Commerce Add to Cart Extras is a great little module that provides the ability to turn a product listing view into an add to cart form. It does this by providing a new field that you add to a view which provides a quantity text box and makes the entire view an add to cart form. This differs from the existing “Add to Cart” field provided by commerce, which allows you to add a single item to the cart from a list.
This allows you to do some useful things such as creating a bulk order form which lists some or all of the products on your site, allowing customers to enter a quantity directly for the products they want. Or, you can utilize standard Views functionality to create another add to cart form for wholesalers on products with several attributes allowing them to add quantities of each individual product quickly and easily. Let’s take a brief look at how we can do this. Just download and enable the module, and you’re ready to get started.
Have you ever wanted to be able to have a single page where you could update pricing and/or stock for your entire store? Look no further! Today you'll learn how to create a price and/or stock updater in 5 minutes with Views and the Editable Views module. It isn't perfect, but it can save you a bunch of time!
Hi everyone, here is a case study about the recent personal business that I started, and how I’ve been able to build a complete working eCommerce store with Drupal Commerce, without being a developer and with almost no coding.
Last summer, when I came back from my traditional wedding in China with my awesome wife, I realized that there was no way for us to buy clothes for couples in France, whereas it is so common in China.
That’s the reason why we decided (my wife and I) to bring that concept into Europe, starting in France. But we had to tweak the concept a bit to fit a European market, since European couples don’t act the same and tend to be more individualistic than Asian couples. So we had to create designs that our customers could wear separately, as well as a couple. We started with t-shirts since they’re fairly easy to produce and sell.
Have you installed Drupal 8 yet? That toolbar is an incredible piece of art. It's functional, beautiful, and really slick. The icons are resolution independent, so that means your average mobile phone and some of the higher end laptops can show off a lot more icon detail. It's so pretty, it's just begging to be extended and filled with all the awesome-sauce that is Drupal Commerce.
Below is a journey through making a toolbar icon happen on Drupal 8-alpha6. Note that things can definitely change between now and a stable Drupal 8.
D8 Toolbar Status
So, unless you were in the issue queues helping make decisions and solve problems, you've likely not taken much time to follow the evolution of the toolbar. In Drupal 7, this is the toolbar you get:
And in Drupal 8, you get so much more:
Toolbar Bar - This is the black bar across the top. Yes it's called the "Toolbar Bar" (note the double "bar"). In a particularly brilliant stroke, we have four very simple actions. The clutter is gone. And the best part? The links collapse into icons on smaller screens.
Toolbar Tray - This is the white bar just below the black bar that can go "horizontal" using a toggle switch. Unlike Drupal 7, the top bar items tie directly to the second bar. I, for one, am very impressed with how comfortable this tray feels. Finally, Drupal has a world-class toolbar.
Toolbar Tray expansion - When in a horizontal
Icons - Notice all those icons? They're a new feature and that's the focus of the rest of this article. Lots to talk about.
I don't know about you guys, but I like to hang out in the Question & Answer section of drupalcommerce.org. Lots of great people in there sharing knowledge and upvoting the hardest questions. Today, I wanted to highlight a particularly great question.
Mike wants to know "How to subscribe customer to an Organic Group?" The answer is simple, you can do this using rules and about 10 minutes of clicking around. So I created a quick walkthrough and have given the step-by-steps below the video.
This year's BADCamp will feature an eCommerce Summit on Thursday, October 24th from 9 AM to 5 PM in the Berkeley City Club. We're inviting everyone interested in growing their Drupal eCommerce practice to come talk "shop" as we listen to presentations and hold discussions about Drupal Commerce, eCommerce best practices, and strategies for the future of commerce on Drupal.
We really are looking forward to holding a participatory event where people may stand up and present information (good) but also where participants are engaged to ask questions on topics they don't understand, answer those questions they can, and collectively learn new ways to implement Commerce and grow an eCommerce practice (better).
