By Amazon on

Big news folks- CivicSpace Labs has just helped a major new eCommerce company launch this week using on CivicSpace/Drupal, at http://www.GoodStorm.com. We think this is going to be one of the highest traffic CivicSpace sites ever launched, and it's already yielding a lot of new useful Drupal code(organic group stores, e-commerce products, sub-products, apparel, paypal pro, e-civicrm).

GoodStorm is explicitly aimed at helping non-profit organization earn income to support their work through merchandising-- which is to say that it provides production, online sales, and fulfillment of printed branded apparel as an online service. We think that where CivicSpace helps to provide online tools to organizations, GoodStorm will help the organizations help themselves to become financially sustainable.

We had to push a bit, but we succeeded in getting it all built on Drupal, and tons of new Drupal eCommerce functionality is being funded, built, and contributed back to Drupal as a result. CiviCRM will be integrated as a toolset for each storeowner, and there will be modules to easily integrate GoodStorm storefronts directly into existing Drupal sites.

Development for Goodstorm was made with contributions from many Drupal developers and has been contributed back to the Drupal community or will be shortly. Contributions include: Karoly Negyesi: organic group stores and forums, Jeremy Andrews: PayPal Pro, e-civicrm, Gordon Heydon: e-commerce sub-products, Nedjo Rogers e-commerce sub products, e-commerce apparel, e-commerce custom, Jeff Robins: LogginTobbogan patches for 4.6, Matt Westgate provided e-commerce expertise and maintained many of the contributions. The site was developed by the Goodstorm team lead by Mark Burdett and Nathan Ramella who will be leading efforts to move the Drupal code back into contributions where it will benefit from community use, patches, and security reviews. Marc Scheff was the creative director and the site was designed by Heather Miller.

With that, I'm off to do my holiday shopping at GoodStorm to support a great new CivicSpace/Drupal project and, more importantly, the good organizations it supports!

If you would like to be a partner and help raise funds for your organization you can read about it here http://www.goodstorm.com/participate

The CivicSpace Labs Team

Comments

capmex’s picture

capmex commented

Nice site, but is optimized for 800x600 resolutions, I think the layout would look better if centered instead of laying on the left and showing a lot of empty white space on the right on higher resolutions. Personally I prefer fluid layouts.

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saerdna’s picture

saerdna commented

how do you mean its optimized for 800x600? its just a default fixed width layout.

capmex’s picture

capmex commented

I mean the fixed width fills the entire screen at 800x600, while at a lower screen resolution you need to scroll horizontally to see the whole page, and on higher screen resolutions there's a gap or empty space on the right, which makes the page look uneven.

I was just suggesting to center the content's container like in friendselectric theme, to make it look more pleasant at higher screen resolutions.
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Zach Harkey’s picture

Zach Harkey commented

Amazon and the CivicSpace Labs Team have announced some awesome new eCommerce functionality they have funded, built, and contributed to the community — functionality that creates fantastic new e-commerce opportunities for all of us. They aren't asking for personal opinions on their page layout so let's not get into a lame 'fixed vs. liquid' layout debate, it's tacky.

-zach
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harkey design

: z

capmex’s picture

capmex commented

It was just something that draw my attention.

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kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

Congratulations are in order Kieran, and thank to all who participated.

I see that it uses the "stores" module, but what about the back end? Do store owners have their own backend? Do they see only their transactions and not other people's transactions? Is this in ecommerce custom?

I have a client who needs to setup stores (which I did), but he wants the ability for every store owner to (a) see only their transactions and (b) get paid to their own Paypal account (both of which I can do, but if this is in the works, better collaborate with others).
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Personal: Baheyeldin.com

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alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

Would it be possible to have a write up on how the site was built?
Which modules were used etc?

Regards
Alan

Drupal development and themeing, Galway, Ireland

Walt Esquivel’s picture

Walt Esquivel commented

Hi,

It's fantastic reading about the modules used for GoodStorm!

Development for Goodstorm was made with contributions from many Drupal developers and has been contributed back to the Drupal community or will be shortly.

The site was developed by the Goodstorm team lead by Mark Burdett and he will be leading efforts to move the Drupal code back into contributions where it will benefit from community use, patches, and security reviews.

Will the Drupal code developed for GoodStorm be moved back into contributions for 4.6.x and 4.7.x, or only for 4.7.x? The answer to this question may well in fact determine whether I download the latest 4.6.x release and start using it immediately or whether I go with 4.7.x. I hope that 4.6.x can benefit from contributed GoodStorm code.

Thanks to ALL of the wonderful folks that worked/are working at ensuring GoodStorm code comes back to drupal.org to benefit the community. :)

---------------------------------------------------------
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
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mfb’s picture

mfb
they or he
commented

goodstorm.com is built on drupal 4.6. We hope to upgrade everything to 4.7 as soon as feasible. We have a few modules which aren't yet in drupal cvs sandboxes including a patched stores (allowing store owners to track transactions involving their products), 2 shipping modules (allowing multiple shipping options, and multiple shipping price tables based on products and shipping zones) and productimage. In addition to the SKU/subproduct patch, we had to add a few themable functions to core ecommerce modules.

Zach Harkey’s picture

Zach Harkey commented

That is awesome, great work. Also, thank you for contributing so much work to the community.

I've spent a lot of time messing around with the e-commerce module trying to accomplish just this sort of thing, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it that didn't seem like reaching around my ass to scratch my elbow. I finally came to the conclusion that I was trying to force Drupal to do something it just wasn't cut out for.

This looks so good. It gives me hope that I can still use Drupal. But like alanburke said, could you point us in the right direction in terms of the method? Did you use flexinode or create a custom module with content type? It doesn't look like the standard product node. Which modules provide the model, color, quality and size fields? Are they somehow integrated into inventory management?

Your post said you were using some new custom modules, some of which might not have yet been contributed. What are the names of the modules and are development versions of them available for testing on a CVS somehwhere?

Get ready for us to bother you. You've basically pranced in here and dangled a T-bone in front of a pack of starving pitbulls ;)

-zach
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harkey design

EDIT: Link corrected (kbahey)

: z

maxer’s picture

maxer commented

Was having the smae issues you exprianced with the e-commerce plug in. Just can get it to work properly. Hopfully this would sereve as a better alternative

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Walt Esquivel’s picture

Walt Esquivel commented

Hi Zach,

I'm getting an "Error 404 Page not found" at the URL you provided, http://www.goodstorm.com/item/princessproject/the_princess_project_sassy'%20rel=

Could you repost please?

Also, I think you're funny! Do you write comedy?!

Get ready for us to bother you. You've basically pranced in here and dangled a T-bone in front of a pack of starving pitbulls ;)

Thank you in advance. I'd send you a digital t-bone if I knew how to! ;)

---------------------------------------------------------
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
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mfb’s picture

mfb
they or he
commented

We don't consider flexinode to scale very well (serialized data etc.) so we coded additional modules and added db tables as needed. We added a new module to handle each new node type: apparel (blank shirts on which custom products are based), custom (the actual products people create and sell) and productimage (to handle multiple image uploads for products).

subproducts module is what does the heavy lifting as far as product variations, and also includes javascript used in product selection (e.g. greying out unavailable options). this results in dependencies for two other modules, drupaljs and pear (which includes the Services_JSON package).

ok I probably need a blog entry to list and link to all the modules we're using ;) Will link it here when it's up.

Amazon’s picture

Amazon commented

Gordon Heydon has just taken over as the ecommerce maintainer and he will be including a critical patch to allow for products, sub-products, and apparel.

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/nedjo/modules...
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/nedjo/modules...
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/nedjo/modules...

These are good places to start. I'll ask the goodstorm folks how much longer until they check back the code. Kieran at civicspacelabs dot org if you want to collaborate on improving these modules.

Kieran Lal

arthurf’s picture

arthurf commented

Hi-

I'm trying to figure out where the mysql definitions for some of this stuff are- I've installed it, but right now I'm getting some complaints about ec_product parent and children. I created these columns, but I'm not sure i've got every thing squared away.

Thanks!

mfb’s picture

mfb
they or he
commented

http://www.goodstorm.com/blog/mark/2005/12/20/some_source_code_with_that...

crischan’s picture

crischan commented

Goodstorm looks like the cutting edge of ECommerce with Drupal. I Just tested your cvs-available modules and they look good.
But still I can't get them to work as I think they are supposed to:

  • When generating multiple subproducts only one actually gets created, even as multiple "Variation information saved." messages show up.
  • I'm stuck on switching product descriptions when selecting a different product variant. Actually switching between different pics like here is what I look for.

So maybe you give some more docs on all that.

Thanks for everything so far!

sime’s picture

sime
any/any
Location Melbourne
commented

How good is Civic Space!!