ecommerce

I'm working through Packt Publishing's Ubercart 2x book to create a spiffy Drupal e-commerce site. So far, I'm finding the book itself worthwhile; it's been quite a help in installing and setting up Ubercart, and creating some basic products. All fine and good, and I look forward to showing off a sample site and writing up the book review.

What's taking me so long is getting Drupal/Ubercart to work right. First I had a problem with certain Ubercart admin forms making themselves unavailable – a problem which, like an earlier unrelated problem with image paths, mysteriously hiccuped itself into resolved status. (Oh, Drupal, stop toying with me.)

Now it's problems with importing nodes from a spreadsheet. This is a part of the book I could just skip, creating all my sample products one node at a time. But I've been wanting to play with node importing for some time now; I have plans for a future site that'll require mass import of music-related data. Any e-commerce site I build in the future, too, is almost certain to require import of product data, so I definitely want to take this chance to learn the importing ropes.

The import process calls upon the good offices of the Node Import module, a welcome tool which, although used in the Packt book, isn't entirely up to full production snuff in Drupal 6. My first bug upon trying to import product data took the form of an ugly error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function uc_product_node_is_product()...

Bleah. One solution, as noted in module issues threads, is to forego the latest release candidate, 6.x-1.0-rc4, and use the newer 6.x-1.x-dev instead. That worked! But then comes the second bug:

Once the spreadsheet file and other assets (such as images) are all ready, Node Import takes you through an eight-screen process to start the import. Click "Start Import" on that last screen, and something magical is supposed to happen with (I'm told) a progress screen and, finally, magically-created nodes. Alas, I'm getting the Drupal equivalent of that Millennium Falcon hyperspace scene, where the engines rev up and... sputter out, keeping the ship right where it is. My site just jumps back to the start of the import process, with no progress bars, nothing imported, no new nodes. I add a little detail in an issues thread where a couple other Drupalers have reported the same trouble.

(ADDITION: The above problem holds true using both a tab-separated format or a comma-separated format, whether I output from Numbers or from Excel. Actually, using comma-separated (CSV) format, it holds true using general Latin encodings – but what Node Import asks for is UTF8 encoding. When I try that, I don't even get as far as the end of the eight screens; after just four or so, I get this lovely error message:

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /<my web site path>/sites/all/modules/node_import/node_import.admin.inc on line 371

Sigh.)

So that's where I am today. I expect I'll get past it eventually... maybe even really quickly, if a kind soul reading this can suggest what's going wrong. Anyone?? (Banging on the monitor isn't helping at all.) 

In the meantime, looking ahead through the Packt book, I see all kinds of exciting Ubercart features waiting to be tapped. Sure hope I can get there soon!

EDIT: I think my problem's solved. See end.

I'm working on an Ubercart store using the documentation at Ubercart.org and Packt Publishing's Ubercart 2x book. According to that book and to Ubercart.org documentation, the form at Administer › Store administration › Configuration › Cart settings should have three tabs: Cart settings, Cart panes, and Cart block. However, on the new site I created, I see no tabs at all; there are the various settings expected for the Cart settings tab (General cart settings, Anonymous cart duration, Continue shopping element, and Cart breadcrumb), but there are no actual tabs, and thus no way to reach the settings for Cart panes and Cart block.

Any ideas on why this might be? I'm on Drupal 6.15 and Ubercart 6.x-2.2. I tried enabling all core and optional Ubercart modules, to no avail. The Theme is the default Garland. No funny cacheing- or optimization-related features are enabled. What could cause these tabs to be missing?

(I've asked the question at the Ubercart.org forums and the Drupal.org forums, and am still looking for an answer. Thanks to anyone who can help!)

EDIT: I'm going to sheepishly – if tentatively – retract my question. I've been unable to find any other folks with the same problem, suggesting that it's truly a bizarre quirk of my own setup, and not a Drupal or Ubercart problem per se, with a clean answer floating about out there. In the end, I tried "joggling" things: clearing cached data in admin/settings/performance (even though I have cache disabled); and, disabling and then re-enabling Ubercart modules. Somehow, those actions did the trick: I now get the missing tabs. 

As happens with Drupal problems now and then, it's a welcome but unsatisfying resolution; it's the equivalent of smacking a TV to make the picture come in, without revealing anything about the source of the problem, how to prevent it happening again, and what to do if a future recurrence proves more stubborn. Sigh. In any case, things do look to be working again. 

For anyone running across the same problem and this post in the future: You may be facing a "gremlins" issue and not a clear problem to be reasoned out. Try purging with any and all caches, disabling and re-enabling modules, and just general fiddling with things. Heck, try giving the monitor a few knocks; that just may do it. : /  

Time for more learnin'! Following an earlier reading and review of Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site Guide, I plan on plunging into Packt Publishing's Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x. Ubercart (documentation) is one of the more popular – perhaps the most popular? – shopping cart solutions ready-made for Drupal. I've heard lots of good thing about it, but as you'd expect, an e-commerce solution for your site is not the sort of thing you knock out in a slow afternoon. Making a real online store for real products takes lots of planning and testing.

I've only played with Ubercart in the past, making a simple test store to check out its capabilities. With a full-blown book in hand, I'll undertake more serious study. Glancing through the contents, I see Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x covers creation of a working e-store, with useful side forays into topics like Drupal installation, general configuration, Panels, SEO, security, and store-related theming. (I'm probably cool with the Drupal installation and configuration basics, but could stand to learn more about those other asides.) 

Looks like good stuff; I will definitely post a review of the book. In the meantime, the interested can pick up a copy via Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x (Amazon affiliate link; helps pay the bandwidth!), or visit the Packt Publishing page, or just check out a free PDF sample excerpt.

(PS: I looked up the status of the other well-known Drupal shopping cart module package, e-Commerce, and was surprised to see that it's in development mode awaiting full Drupal 6 release. In the past I'd heard many good things about e-Commerce from its fans. Does anyone reading this have experience with e-Commerce? Any thoughts on how it and Ubercart compare?) 

Here's the second installment of my Amazon and Drupal experiments.

First, a note on a topic I mentioned, the recent requirement that Amazon affiliates go to aws.amazon.com to acquire a new Access Key ID and Secret Access Key: The Amazon module kindly warns you right on your main admin page if your Keys are incomplete or outdated. Here's the message I didn't spot when I was troubleshooting things on my own:

The Amazon API must be configured with an Access Key ID and an Amazon AWS Secret Access Key to function. Go to Amazon API Setttings.

Helpful! All right then, on to a new feature, Amazon Stores:

How can you easily add Amazon product links to a Drupal site? If you've been working with Drupal at all, you can guess the answer: There's a module for that!

That would be the Amazon module. Yet... How do you use that module? As noted in this forum thread, the module contains nearly no documentation, and I failed to find anything among the Drupal.org handbooks. 

There's a little documentation on Drupal.org for the Amazon Store module but not for the Amazon module itself. This finding is repeated inside a comment at comment at Drupal Modules.com: "It doesn't have any documentation on how to use it but I found a lot out by visiting the issue queue and reading the user posts."

I'm trying to get Amazon working on another site, just a simple way to display some Amazon offerings alongside a node, or even an in-site "store". One solution, of course, is to paste Amazon code directly into nodes or blocks, but that's somewhat static; I'm interested in seeing what a module can do to improve upon that. Some problems and in-progress solutions: