Drupal Commerce Blog

Drupal Commerce Blog

What's happening in the world of Drupal Commerce.

Approaching the first stable release of Commerce Kickstart v2

On September 17th, the first release candidate of Commerce Kickstart v2 was released. This was the first release usable in production, with a guaranteed upgrade path. It allowed us (the product team at Commerce Guys) to receive feedback from developers and users starting new projects on Kickstart, as well as address it as we went along. We've had 3 more release candidates since then, and the first stable release is now closer than ever. Here's what's been keeping us busy.

Stabilizing the included modules

A modern distribution needs to include many modules to satisfy its use cases. During Kickstart development, we improved many of those modules in order to improve their stability and feature set to match Kickstart standards. Dozens of patches were created and submitted to the relevant issue queues.

Still, contrib moves at a different pace than Kickstart itself, which means that many patches couldn't be committed in time for Kickstart RC1. So we shipped the distribution with many -dev releases and many uncommitted patches, which naturally made people nervous.

Jonathan S's picture
Posted: November 13, 2012
2 Comments

Drupal Commerce 1.4 Release

Commerce Guys recently hosted a workshop to prepare the roadmap for Drupal Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8. During the week, we spent a bit of time reviewing and committing the final patches needed to release Drupal Commerce 1.4. The new version is a maintenance release incorporating 87 patches from 40 different contributors around the world - I love it! These patches add a variety of new features to the core of Drupal Commerce and make it more performant and suited to international usage.

I've summarized the key changes in this post. The full list of changes and update instructions can be found in the release notes on drupal.org.

New features

The Add to Cart form and checkout form have both seen improvements. Most notable on the checkout form is the new setting to allow copying of fields from one customer profile to another. This feature was a part of the Commerce Shipping module but was moved to core and designed to work server side across multiple checkout pages and even between customer profile types that may have different fields. The Account information checkout pane was also updated to support e-mail address verification through double entry.

We included a variety of Views integration improvements, including adding a missing handler, updating area handlers for Views 3.5, supporting redirect destinations on our entity operation links, and adding a node filter to only show product display nodes.

Finally, we added a few features to make it simpler for site builders to build product pricing rules. Foremost among these is a new Price comparison condition that supports multi-currency price comparisons and accepts input in major currency unit decimal values instead of minor unit integer values (i.e. compare in Dollars or Euros instead of Cents). We also added a read only computed property allowing you to use the generic Data comparison condition against these major unit decimal values.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: October 31, 2012
0 Comments

Commerce Kickstart 2.0 Release Candidate

Bojan tagged a release candidate of Commerce Kickstart 2.0 on Monday before taking a well-deserved vacation. This releases solidifies the set of contributed modules and custom code we've built the distribution on, and it brings a high level of polish to visual elements like the customer administration theme.

This release also marks a milestone change in maintenance strategy for the project. Subsequent releases will contain an upgrade path for sites using the distribution in production, with new releases also being packaged up to accommodate contributed module updates.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: September 21, 2012
3 Comments

Welcome to the new DrupalCommerce.org!

We launched the new DrupalCommerce.org in the wee hours of the morning after a marathon migration sprint. As I mentioned before, the old site was created on Drupal 6 in late 2009 and was minimally maintained as a community forum. We always wanted to build a much more intentional user self-help community, but we were limited by the technology we were running.

The new site was built from scratch on Drupal 7 to give us a much more flexible foundation. Aaron Dudenhofer implemented the design you see as an Omega subtheme, and I built many of the features while Kris Vanderwater figured out how to use the Migrate module to move old content into the new systems.

There's still more content to flesh out and a little site building to be done, but let's take a quick look at the most prominent new features:

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: May 31, 2012
9 Comments

DrupalCommerce.org Redesign in Progress

This website has largely remained unchanged since its creation at the end of 2009. Despite Drupal 7 being released in January 2011, we still haven't updated to it to take advantage of its latest and greatest features to foster a better community here around Drupal Commerce. While the site saw active maintenance and incremental improvement under rfay for many months, we're finally going to bring a fresh coat of paint and revamped feature set to help build a better self-help and user support community on DrupalCommerce.org.

In late January and early February we commissioned a new design for the site, choosing to go with a bold, fresh design over a "tried and true" corporate look. It emphasizes in many ways the vibrant, friendly community we're seen growing and brings immediate focus to items of interest to new visitors.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: May 23, 2012
9 Comments

Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon Denver

DrupalCon Denver will be the first major DrupalCon to offer a Commerce track in addition to a full day of Drupal Commerce training before the conference. While it's a modest start at 5 sessions spread throughout the entire 3 day session schedule, it's an important step toward raising the profile of e-commerce on Drupal.

The Commerce sessions accepted include:

If you haven't attended a DrupalCon in the past, it's the premier Drupal event in the U.S. drawing upwards of 4,000 attendees. While there are only a handful of sessions dealing directly with Drupal Commerce or e-commerce topics, the variety of sessions presented at the conference will more than likely apply to your process of building a complete Drupal based website. Sessions pertaining to Views, Rules, Git, and other contributed modules and contribution processes are sure to help you.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: November 19, 2011
0 Comments

Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon London

The annual European DrupalCon is coming to the U.K. on August 22-26, 2011. The venue for the event is Fairfield Halls in Croydon just south of London. If you're anywhere close, this will be the place to find out the latest happenings in the Drupal community. Come join us!

We'll have one Drupal Commerce session on the official schedule, a panel discussion titled Developing with Drupal Commerce. Several long time contributors to the project will be joining me to discuss what it takes to use Drupal Commerce on European projects of various sizes and complexities and how to best write code to add features or integrate with external services. I'm excited to lead the discussion and will take the opportunity to introduce each aspect of the modules and code that we talk about.

If you're looking for more in depth information on Drupal Commerce, join Commerce Guys for a full day of Drupal Commerce training on August 22, 2011. We'll be covering every aspect of the core modules in addition to introducing new functionality meant to improve the site builder experience around creating product displays and customizable Add to Cart forms.

Finally, expect to see a full schedule of "Birds of a Feather" (BoF) sessions that couldn't fit into the official conference program. With five times as many sessions proposed as were accepted to the conference schedule, it was inevitable that many Drupal Commerce proposals would be left out. BoF sessions provide a chance for interested attendees to still gather and discuss a topic of interest in a specially designated area of the conference venue.

We hope to see many of you there!

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: July 6, 2011
2 Comments

DrupalCon Chicago Session Video

DrupalCon Chicago was quite a rush. It was the first Drupal event since we've hit a stable release of the Commerce modules, and the feedback from all directions was extremely positive. The video for my session, Drupal Commerce: Setting up shop on Drupal 7, was posted to archive.org, but the service there isn't the most reliable or feature-rich. As such, I've cross-posted the video to vimeo, so watch away!

Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon Chicago from Ryan Szrama on Vimeo.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: March 30, 2011
6 Comments

DrupalCon Chicago Development Roadmap

Getting "there" from "here". If only it were as simple as finding directions on a Google Map. : )

The goal? Have a solid 1.0 release by Drupal Commerce with a simple installation profile ready for new users to start selling on Drupal 7.

Where are we now? Still firmly in alpha territory, with a beta looming. In the last few days, the big ticket item - dynamic pricing and price pre-calculation - has landed, preparing the way for taxes and tax display. The only major feature left then will be physical product description fields, but we're going to hold off on rushing any shipping price calculation for 1.0. Work will develop around this in contrib and be targeted for a 2.0 inclusion if ready.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: December 21, 2010
0 Comments

Drupal Commerce 7.0-alpha2 Released

The first Drupal Commerce alpha release received little fanfare here somehow. In the press of DrupalCon Copenhagen, I neglected to post the news here of all places! Well, I'm fixing that right now with this little announcement for our second alpha release that just went live minutes ago. You can download it from our project page on drupal.org.

Most everything worth saying about the release is in the release notes, so I encourage you to read those. The short version is we now have a fully functioning Payment module, making alpha 2 a great time for payment integrators to start roughing out their Commerce integration. There's also a great base test class for Commerce tests with documentation to go with it, so folks looking to dig into the modules and APIs are encouraged to do it while writing some much needed tests.

The Specification handbook here has also received quite a bit of love to go along with the release, so I encourage you to poke around and provide feedback on its structure and on the content that's actually there. For now you'll need to look in the Info hooks and Utilizing the core APIs sections as the others are just scaffolding.

Ryan Szrama's picture
Posted: October 9, 2010
6 Comments

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