Drupal for an e-commerce site?
Hi all.
I have sucessfully installed Drupal and have it working and it seems like it will be absolutely perfect for a few sites I am working on now, but I am trying to determine if Drupal will be a decent wrapper for an e-commerce site I am building.
I had built a preliminary look and feel version of the site using Dreamweaver with HTML + javascript for some image swapping behavior and most of the products are displayed using tables. I had planned on using MySQL to both to populate the website's dynamic content and track inventory.
So my question is: am I really trying to do to much with Drupal and should I be looking elsewhere (if so where?) If it is possible (& feasible without too much extra effort), what steps, modules, and documentation do you recommend?
Thanks in advanced,
Dan
P.S. In case it matters, I have Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2, and MySQL 5 installed.
e-commerce module?
Have you had any look around here? I mean check out the Downloads > Modules section, you'll find literally hundreds of modules that extend your Drupal site, including a few commerce & advertising modules, you might especially want to check out the e-commerce module (and again a few other modules that extend its functionality).
Not sure about the image swapping thing you think of, but there are also a couple of image modules available. There is a guide somewhere that explains how you can display a thumbnail on teaser pages (i.e. product listings) and a bigger image on the page (i.e. product page) itself with CCK, imagefield, imagecache and upload.
check out makefunds.com
makefunds.com have made available a drupal ecommerce distro.
based on drupal 4.7 but it's free to use, modify and distribute.
download and customise to your liking. they have already included most of the modules you might require.
the surprise is that the word does not seem to have got around much (in these forums) about makefunds.com
Goloka
Makefunds.com
Hey thanks for that Makefunds tip/link; looks like something we could use. Anyone have experience or feedback on using it?
Unless you are only going to
Unless you are only going to be doing a small amount of e-commerce I would recommend looking elsewhere, such as zencart or oscommerce, because Drupal is really not set up for it at all, regardless of what modules are available. You could run the other software alongside drupal, with it acting as your store and drupal acting as CMS for text and community forums. Zencart integrates with phpbb2 for this purpose.
What is a small amount?
Hi Zew Zeal.
Thanks for the tip, but I was wondering what what your definition of a small amount is?
How hard would it be to port code from zencart or oscommerce?
Have you had a look at makefunds.com's Drupal-based design?
I really like the instant forum, blog, etc. you get with Drupal, so, if possible, I would like to use it as long as it makes sense.
By the way, I am assuming MySQL + PHP is the way to go with respect to building an e-commerce site that is fast, searchable, etc.
Thanks,
Dan
Zen Cart thread...
This thread: Online store + community - Drupal e-commerce, ZenCart, or other? talks about some of these same things. It turns into more of a discussion of Zen Cart at the end, but it might be worth a perusing.
FWIW, I would recommend against OSCommerce -- it's not terribly developer-friendly nor very well-managed (having gone years without any release of a new version). A decent OSCommerce store really requires some serious forking of code / addition of community created contributions - to the point where it becomes a unique, un-upgradable store in the end. It's got a lot of nice functionality and a huge amount of contributions, but, medium/long term, it may put you in a bind that you don't want to be in.
Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios
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