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.
I've personally never been satisfied with basic forums as means to effectively answer questions and catalog those answers for future searchers. Many posts are duplicates, and we've never really had the forums here setup to accommodate different types of requests in the first place. We'll keep a general discussion board moving forward, but we'll introduce a "Stack Exchange" lite here for people to ask questions and find answers. I expect the feature set to expand with time, so we'll launch with a fresh system of questions, answers, and voting and grow it as we go.
Commerce Guys has also recently hired Josh Miller (joshmiller) to flesh out the documentation here on DrupalCommerce.org. It was a bit naive to expect new users to be able to grasp the wide variety of concepts and interplay between modules to pitch in and help document Drupal Commerce. Thus, Josh's immediate task was to evaluate where the site builder documentation currently stood and get busy revamping the entire user guide. This will of course be featured on the new DrupalCommerce.org and hopefully open the doors to many new users to get started on their next Drupal Commerce project.
As of right now we're implementing a few final parts of the site and working the kinks out of the data migration. Expect the new design to come online in the near future, and please bear with us as we all adjust to the shiny new toys.
Comments
Stack Exchange lite
Thanks for the info! Really good to get this site up to snuff and bring more sense of progression to this wonderful framework.
However:
"we'll introduce a "Stack Exchange" lite here for people to ask questions and find answers.
I really do not understand the Drupal community's insistence of this Not Invented Here -policy. Why implement a Stack Exchange lite or cling to byzanthine threads on D.O when there's already http://drupal.stackexchange.com - a Stack Exchange full version at our disposal.
It's totally ok to take advantage of brilliant third party tools created specifically for this need.
Yeah, the question comes up
Yeah, the question comes up quite a bit, but allow me to ask a question in reply. How would you index all that content on Stack Exchange so that answers to users' questions are findable within the same search box as our documentation, showcase sites, etc.? (That's not the only reason we're baking this in here, but it's the primary one.)
I kinda feel like that's a
I kinda feel like that's a non-issue and more a question of educating users. The time when everything needed to be found within the scope of one website is long gone and helping people find what they're looking for on Stack Exchange is pretty simple.
Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone would actually go on this specific site to search for answers to their problems as that's what Google is for. I've been building stuff on Drupal Commerce for a good 6 months now and have literally never searched on this site. Every time I have a question or issue regarding Drupal Commerce, I fire up Google and 60% of the time land here, 20% on drupal.stackexchange.com and 20% on D.O.
Personally, I'd love to see the ratio flip radically in favor of drupal.stackexchange.com simply because as far as technical Q&A is concerned, nobody comes close to the quality, both in terms of content and tools for determining value.
Just my two cents. I've just found it a bit disturbing how deep the Drupal community is in the NIH swamp sometimes.
Fair enough. I rarely use
Fair enough. I rarely use site specific searches myself, except when I want to search project pages on d.o or within my own issue queues for closed issues. However, according to GA, we've had about 4500 searches on site in the last 30 days. Not huge, but no small potatoes.
I try to get to the Drupal Stack Exchange every now and then to answer questions, but I can only keep track of so many queues / sites. The issue queue on d.o about maxes me out as is, especially since I can't turn support requests off there, so I look forward to people finding better help for themselves here real soon. : )
First off, congrats on the
First off, congrats on the redesign! Looking good!
For module admins, the issue queue should obviously be priority. As Drupal is a community effort, I'd love to see horizontal information sharing being enabled better. For this there's just no beating next generation Q&A sites like Stack Exchange.
I may have forgotten to mention this in my first message that this is in no means critique directed at Drupal Commerce specifically but to the whole community in general. We should use the right tools for the right job and as it currently stands, Drupal just doesn't offer a good enough experience for Q&A without major customization. The great people at Stack Exchange provide an A+ level service at no cost, so disregarding that community simply because it isn't of the Drupal community just feels silly.
I'm tracking you - no hard
I'm tracking you - no hard feelings or anything. Thanks for stopping back in to check out the new site. : )
Congratulations on the new site it is a definite improvement
I wanted to say congratulations to the team on this achievement. Regardless of where the help comes from, it is help, nonetheless. The Drupal Commerce team puts a lot of time and thought into their work and I know I appreciate it. Considering how confusing it has been for me to get this far in Drupal Commerce with my own site, I'm very happy that they choose to focus on the community in such an obvious way.
Where do I find these modules?
I have installed commerce_kickstart-7.x-2.0-alpha1.core.zip. I cannot find the following modules. I thought they would be included with the zip. Other module were also needed and now I am down to these few. I looked in all but the right places. Sorry for bugging you with such a simple question.
http://mysitesname/install.php produces the Commerce Kickstart install but missing the following Module_filter, Field_extractor, Image_delta_formatter, Oauth_common, Http_client, Taxonomy_menu, Link, Mimemail_compress, Commerce_kickstart_reset, Cloud_zoom, Pathauto, Inline_entity_form, Entityreference, Views_megarow, Commerce_autosku, Commerce_addressbook, Commerce_discount, Commerce_discount_date, Commerce_discount_usage, Commerce_fancy_attributes, Features, Commerce_features, Commerce_kickstart_content, Commerce_kickstart_search, Commerce_kickstart_product, Commerce_kickstart_product_ui, Commerce_kickstart_order, Commerce_kickstart_blog, Commerce_kickstart_blog_ui, Commerce_kickstart_merchandising, Commerce_kickstart_merchandising_ui, Commerce_kickstart_social, Commerce_kickstart_user, Commerce_kickstart_payment
I finally got all the modules
Now I'm at the install profile and warning are display, which I imagine don't kill the installation. But the follow blows down the installation.
SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1040 Column 'module' cannot be null. I have no idea how to fix this.