CSWS - an ubercart site built in 3 days

By Khalor on 6 Oct 2010 at 05:01 UTC

One of the craziest deadlines I've ever worked... from design to development to testing in 72 hours. Haven't slept much these last couple of days.

Colab Summer Workshop Series - an e-commerce/registration site for a series of events run by Auckland University of Technology
NOTE THIS IS A LIVE SITE... any orders placed will be charged for

Design was based on branded printed materials supplied by the client, Ubercart handles the e-commerce side of things, then there's a lot custom shenanigans going on behind the scenes. Due to the incredibly short turnaround time of this there wasn't always time to do things the Drupal way... as a result, this site will serve up this specific series of workshops. And not much else. There's a fair bit of hard-coded nastiness in the theme.

Being an educational institute they wanted all the older browsers fully supported as well, stretching back to IE6. I have a renewed passionate hatred for that browser.

It's mostly Views and CCK, Ubercart 2 + some custom payment modules. Other modules used include:

There's custom modules at work in the cart supplying payment methods, as well as a multi add system being served by a nodereference field to allow adding multiple individual but related products to a cart simultaneously/programmatically.

From a coding standards point of view it's a bit of a mess... but I'm just glad I met the deadline. Doubt I could have done it in any other CMS.

Site hosted by Xplain Hosting and is served using Drupal's regular caching.

Any thoughts, comments, questions, or bug reports are much appreciated.

Comments

Absolutely outstanding!

tonypaulbarker commented 8 October 2010 at 13:36

Absolutely outstanding! Please make the theme available if you can (I appreciate probably not with the background images).

I tried to click on the banner, top left on the home page - maybe that should go through to the workshop pages.

The site could probably benefit from a master navigation menu somewhere, but honestly this is a beautiful piece of work.

Thanks Tony! I'd like to

Khalor commented 10 October 2010 at 03:21

Thanks Tony! I'd like to share the theme, but it'll take a bit of cleanup to make it a bit less specific to this project, and ditch the copyright content (background images).

I can probably code it so that it scans a folder in the theme for images to scroll through, and supply a few default/stock ones... then for nodes if Imagefield exists it can take images uploaded to the node and fade through them instead. That's basically what's happening with the live site at the moment.

Also I've linked the logo/image on the front page through to the workshops now. :) You're probably right about a general navigation menu or bar somewhere, especially if I'm going to release the theme, but I think I get away without one here.

Good stuff. Definitely agree

willhowlett commented 12 October 2010 at 15:42

Good stuff. Definitely agree about it needing an overall nav bar (or just a home link!). If browsing through the site it's disconcerting not being able to get back quickly (and this is from someone who has argued the toss with bosses in the past about the need for breadcrumbs etc. "everyone has a back button on their browser don't they?").