Product Catalog vs E-Commerce Shopping Cart
Anyone know what options there are for someone wanting to build a company website that contains both information about the company and general information, as well as a product catalog to display each product and even specifications and charts. There may be a section in the future that would require login to see but Im not sure yet.
Here is an example of what I mean: http://fineupgrades.com/
I am looking up a lot of the options in the Taxonomy area of things so I do see Uber Cart modules often. However, would that actually help me when all I want is to produce a product catalog (but not actually enable shopping cart features where a customer could buy from the site itself)? I'm hoping to find some online texts or even a book that might help me see what modules I might need. Any information or links to information would be helpful. I believe someone did tell me I need CCK and Taxonomy Modules (which I have the bare-bones came-with-download version of the Taxonomy module). Google and searching through the forums here, turns me over to a lot of "catalog" titled posts but that were never responded to.
Looks to be a challenge but I'm up to it!
If you're 100% positive
If you're 100% positive you'll never want ecommerce functionality, then you could build a catalog pretty easily with taxonomy (core), cck, views, maybe nodequeue, image and/or imagefield, and any of the cck field modules you may want in addition to the ones that come with the default cck package.
If there's even the slightest possibility of adding online purchasing you should probably go with one of the ecommerice modules and just not enable the purchasing functions if possible. This would be important in order to avoid any catalog conversion headaches that may result as consequence of building a custom catalog and then having to migrate to the catalog used by the ecommerce module you chose. I've not used those modules yet, so it may not be an issue but it's worth investigating if ecommerce is on the horizon.
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
More information...useful to others?
WorldFallz>
Yeah, this company only will sell to distributors, rather than any e-store/retail format. Ubercart seemed more geared to a shopping cart site but the option to turn off "add to cart" or "buy" buttons is there too, thank goodness. Now, if I can only find the right book that will show me how CCK, Views, Image(or ImageField), and the Taxonomy core module will all work hand in hand.
rszrma> How many items in addition to the main Module would be needed. Ill be looking thru thier documentation tonight.
Thanks so much to the both of you. So far I found the following additional resources while searching on my own.
http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/01/08/cck-views-the-ultimate-combi... (about CCK)
http://chronnus.com/blog/2008/05/fineupgrades-drupal-powered-product-cat... (found this a few days ago. It gives some detail but no actual tutorials to speak of)
I was discouraged at how putrid computer books selection is in general in my local library system, let alone selection on Drupal books. I did find this one but not sure either since Drupal is so new to me.
http://www.amazon.com/Selling-Online-Drupal-e-Commerce-Technologies/dp/1...
Such new territory and alot of reading to be done.
With Ubercart, you'd need to
With Ubercart, you'd need to enable at a minimum Token, uBrowser, and the Ubercart Product, Store, and Catalog modules. Then at any time if you decide to start selling those products through the site, you'd enable the Ubercart Cart and Order modules. Do some testing, because you might need to enable the cart and order modules anyways and just disable functionality like I hinted above.
As for books, Lullabot just released a book called Using Drupal that covers a lot of core and contrib site development. It's a big picture kind of book, and it includes a large chapter that walks through setting up an Ubercart store in Drupal 6. It's really well done!
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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
Sounds Great!
I am so new at this that I dont just have a green horn, my whole body is green. (hey, I could audition for she-hulk now!;) That said, maybe this book will be useful in helping revisit all the intro reading I have done from this website. Plus, it could also rephrase it in a way that might clear up the few thigns Im not sure about. Thanks so much.
Hoping to hear about the other side of things if one does not use Ubercart. This chick loves me some options.
Any other books?
Any other books?
I believe Ubercart was
I believe Ubercart was mentioned in a German Drupal book... but other than that, not that I know of.
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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
Thanks. Im still unsure
Thanks. Im still unsure what texts are out there which will help me doing it the Non-Ubercart way but Ubercart has lots of good documentation.
In Ubercart, you can
In Ubercart, you can actually disable the add to cart form on products and disable checkout to effectively lockdown the site and just use the product catalog. There's also a catalog module that ships with Ubercart that can help you bypass a lot of the manual setup that can be confusing for new Drupal users.
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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
Thanks ryan-- good to know.
Thanks ryan-- good to know. I'll be embarking on my very first ecommerce project with ubercart right after the holidays so wish me luck. ;-)
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
Is the disable easy? Would
Is the disable easy? Would Ubercart be good for items that have blueprint-like PDFS for people to read and/or download?
Ubercart is actually a good
Ubercart is actually a good solution if you want a catalog based site, even if you do not want any ecommerce functionality. You can disable the "add to cart" button fairly easily (go to admin/store/settings/products/edit/fields to hide / show fields) and you can set how many columns you want to set the table grid to. Additionally I swear by Ubercart for any ecommerce related projects ;) (although I do try out the ecommerce module from time to time just to see if they're a better fit on some projects).
I chose the non-ubercart route for Fine Upgrades because I needed the flexibility of dynamic views in filtering and sorting the products available. I needed to display the products in 2 ways, by brand, and by product type (essentially two vocabularies) and it was easier setting this up with some custom view code. I used taxonomy_menu for the menu listings on the left, with a view override on the 2 menus (browse by type and brand) to display them accordingly. For rendering the product I have a node-product.tpl.php that displayed the teaser as a floating div with a thumbnail imagecache preset and the node title that linked to the node view. The node view and its various section is another thing entirely.
http://www.chronnus.com
Oooh, are there any good
Oooh, are there any good books you could recommend?