Book Image

Getting Started with Drupal Commerce

By : Richard Jones
Book Image

Getting Started with Drupal Commerce

By: Richard Jones

Overview of this book

Drupal Commerce is emerging as the preferred option for open source e-commerce, and it also stands up to comparison against established proprietary systems. Getting Started with Drupal Commerce is an introductory guide to building an online store using Drupal Commerce in Drupal 7. Getting Started with Drupal Commerce takes you step-by-step through a complete e-commerce website build, from a clean installation of Drupal to a working example store. Starting with how to set up a Drupal development environment, we then discuss the planning of an e-commerce site and the typical questions you should be asking before getting started. Next, we walk through all of the essential setup required for most types of e-shop, including taxes, shipping, discounts and coupons, the checkout process, and backend order management. By the end of Getting Started with Drupal Commerce, you will be fully-equipped to plan and build your own store and you will understand the fundamental principles of Drupal Commerce that will enable you to progress to more complex store builds.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with Drupal Commerce
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Prerequisites and dependencies


Drupal Commerce makes use of several other key Drupal contributed modules. Some of them are listed and explained in the coming sections as follows:

The Views module

The Views module (http://drupal.org/project/views) is used extensively throughout Drupal Commerce for almost all the administration screens and shopping cart / checkout. The fact that almost everything in Drupal Commerce is powered by Views makes it very easy to modify the shopping experience for both the customer and store owner without the need for coding.

The Rules module

The Rules module (http://drupal.org/project/rules) is used in many contexts throughout Drupal Commerce including for the calculation of prices and taxes. Rules is a very flexible and extensible system and provides many options for implementing the rules of your business.

The Entity module

The Entity module (http://drupal.org/project/entity) allows much greater access to the entity data that makes up the Commerce system. This will be of great benefit if you start to develop more comprehensive sites using Rules and particularly if you plan to write your own Drupal Commerce modules.

The Address Field module

Instead of defining its own Address field standard, Drupal Commerce utilizes the Address Field module (http://drupal.org/project/addressfield), which uses international standard address formats (xNAL) to ensure that all countries' address standards are supported.

The Chaos Tools module

The Chaos Tools (Ctools) module (http://drupal.org/project/ctools) is a utility module that allows Drupal Commerce to implement a common pluggable architecture.

The Token module

The Token module (http://drupal.org/project/token) provides text placeholders that represent (and are expanded into) entity properties or fields depending on the context of where the token is used. For example, when visiting a user's profile page, the token [user], would represent the user's unique ID (uid) and within the context of an actual item of content such as a page,[author] might expand to the author of the post, that is also the uid property of the item of content.

The Pathauto module

The Pathauto module (http://drupal.org/project/pathauto) automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, and users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.