What a long strange trip it's been..
After coming up with a great idea for ecommerce I made the mistake of going with Joomla. It just seemed at the time to be best for me..
Over 1000 in lost sales later due to 404 errors, "page not found" and NOONE able to solve my bugs I realized I got what I paid for.
Scratching head and remembering that I ran a drupal community 2-3 years ago I came back and set it up..
Now I am no pro. I can get most CMS systems to function.. I don't do php coding but can solve most simple bugs and I can search a forum very well..
I am once again in limbo..
It all started with just trying to get an editor to work.. Then once that's done to get the stupid load picture button to show up. That took a whole day.. Finally.. added the stupid tag at the end of my theme to get that to workk.. ARG!
Now moving on to the real meat....
Ecommerce seemed too good to be true. I set it up and everything worked but the product layout in default left something to be desired.. I just want a page with my product categories on it, then another page for each category with a teaser of my product, pic, etc. All laid out nice in a table.. Not cut off midway through the description etc etc.
I searched everywhere and found a lot of very complicated solutions with zebra stripes.. Is it really that hard???
Okay fine I'll check out ubercart.. WOW.. This has very intuitive product layout and very nicely done with very simple to understand categorization of products..
Now lets just set up paypal.. OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not again.. Now I have to literally hardcode something agian to get that to work don't I??
Is it really this hard to get a well laid out ecommerce site going that uses paypal? Do I really have to learn to use ?>, and $var and all that stuff I hate seeing?
So I guess my question in a nutshell is... Is there a simple way to lay out products nicely in ecommerce, or a simple way to get paypal goign in ubercart?
Thanks.
Comments
Theming
Getting things to look the way you want can often mean touching SOME PHP, but you could quite possibly get the desired result just fiddling with CSS. The reason you can't just put up a Drupal site, throw in ecommerce or whatnot, is because it's designed to be a tool to do MANY things, not just ecommerce. So yes, it can take time to get the desired look and functionality you're striving for, but it also means you are not confined within the boundaries of other tools out there.
Unfortunately I don't have any experience with Ubercart, but theming the product pages with the ecommerce module shouldn't be too difficult, especially if you have any CSS knowledge and some templating.
Hope that helps some. Try asking more specific questions here, the IRC support channel, or the mailing list - people are busy but generally willing to help if they can.
Ubercart and PayPal
Ubercart is a brand spanking new cart system. We plan to integrate PayPal in the very near future, but we are not there yet. Please have patience with us, and we will get it done ASAP.
-Andy
Ubercart, a Free Shopping Cart
I know your frustration...
Let me first start by saying: Drupal is not the way to engineer- an setup things in an intuitive way. It is the way to make whatsoever webproject dat is intuitive to maintain and use!
I feel very familiar with your story, I might be in a better position being a bit of a "professional" programmer ;)
I too find information on e-commerce scattered and a bit incomplete, but he, its free remember?
Tips for you:
1, split teaser and body content, u could use exerpt.module for this
2. show nice procuct listings: use views.module to create them. Its the only way (to me) to play nice with sub-products.
3. theming: Split theme's for teaser and body, check this post: http://drupal.org/node/53464. Yes, you have to do some PHP for it.
Hope it's usefull to you!
Webbased applicaties, content management systemen, websites, webdesign
Just a quick update... the
Just a quick update... the next release of Ubercart will have full PayPal support. You can track progress or offer feedback through the thread here:
http://www.ubercart.org/forum/development/1160/revised_paypal_website_pa...
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Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
PayPal work has been
PayPal work has been completed for now and is being examined by the integration team at PayPal. You can read more about it at http://www.ubercart.org/paypal. The development branch is stable and in use and has the module working... next release here will include it. Read about accessing the development code here at http://www.ubercart.org/bazaar.
Demo any of the PayPal services through the Livetest. (Credit card payments are currently using Website Payments Pro to process cards.)
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Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org