Commerce Kickstart 2.x will expand in a variety of ways to make it both easier for and more attractive to new users. If Drupal Commerce is supposed to provide the framework, then distributions should provide the "application" layer polish. Right now, Commerce Kickstart is little more than an installation profile, but it can do more even with existing contributed modules.

Work is ongoing in the following modules that we should consider for inclusion in a revamped Commerce Kickstart, and of course we'll want to flesh out the example store content options we currently provide in the installation process.

Comments

farald’s picture

Here are some suggestions:

Ive created a sandbox project with an installation profile & a collection of features.
Based out of 2 sandboxes, Commercify installation profile and Commercify feature pack .
Take it down with drush make http://drupalcode.org/sandbox/farald/1555310.git/blob_plain/refs/heads/7.x-1.x:/distro.make

This is basically an attempt to create an order interface with existing modules & techniques. It's pretty much a work in progress, but you can draw some ideas from it. Im considering either continuing with this and push it out as a full project, or putting efforts into Commerce Kickstart 2.0. There's so much potential for creating an advanced, traditional webstore with Drupal, but Commerce core alone provide only a backbone. Now we invent the wheel over & over again on each store we create. So a unified, good startingpoint could be a huge win!

As I see it, the day-to-day administration of such a out-of-box Drupal store is the most important part. It needs to look good, be effective and provide all the necessary operations without having to click around too much.
For me the utopic Commerce installation profile has:

  • An advanced, integrated administration interface, for common tasks
  • A basic frontend, type traditional webstore with simple categories tree. Preferably a Sasson based theme ready to be overridden or hacked.
  • Ready to use product types of various structures
  • Example content. This could either reside as a per-product type feature, or as a Selenium "test" that the user runs towards the newly created installation. (Then again, Selenium might not be for the low-tech user.)

Out-of-box it could handle a wide variety of product types:

  • A physical product (with stock handling?)
  • An digital download product using Commerce File. This would be a real showoff if it could sell files out-of-the-box.
  • An attributed product (like clothes with different sizes).
  • Node product, for selling ads or promotion

This could be done by selecting in the installation profile what type of store you want to create, and from there using Features "packages" to build up the store. The point of lots of different products would be to create a base for both non-Drupal people to gaze at, but also for developers to work and get ideas from.

Special product types are really not as important as the admin interface itself with proper workflow.
A proper store handling interface should in my opinion be built with the storekeeper's workflow constantly in mind, and provide all necessary steps:

  • A unified interface for all day-to-day store actions. Handling orders, creating products, discounts etc should be within 1-2 clicks from main dropdown. (Build around dashboard?)
  • A start page that provides all the statistical data that the admin could want, about sales, bestsellers, best customers etc.
  • Ready-to-use exports with Views data export, and maybe also Views PDF. Views PDF for exporting orders for packaging, and data formats for exporting Products, Orders, the lot. The more entities that allow fast export the better. Imagine search and export using VBO
  • All entity overviews should be based on VBO, with its own set of rule-based commands.
  • There should be a sensible order workflow, from cart to completed. Each order status could have its own view, with its own batch commands for moving between order statuses etc.
  • Good connection between creation of product and product display. I see this is solved with Inline entity form in a much better way than Commerce product display manager
  • Coupon functionality using coupon, as already mentioned. Maybe have 2 types of coupons, one for % & one for fixed amount. And of course a rule to prevent negative order amounts.
  • Commerce Stock should be considered. There are however some issues with this module still in need to be resolved.
  • Base things on features, smaller the better
  • Keeping track of suppliers, thus provide an easy way to automatically provide backorders for products with low stock. Easily done with a nodetype and a entity reference field.
  • Order handling history per order. This is coming in with #804850: Integrate Order Revisions with Views
  • Rules for sending emails to customer when order status changes

Another idea:

  • Send order PDF to customer using a Mime Mail rule combined with Views PDF, (or use Commerce Email,but that's just dev.)

Now what I am curious of, should CK2 try to kickstart at this level, or should kickstart implement a simpler setup, keeping it clean from for example non-beta dependencies?

bojanz’s picture

Hi, farald.

You have a good overview of what a nice install profile needs to have. It matches almost exactly both my thoughts and our Kickstart v2 current plans / state of code.

We are providing the main pillars that you mentioned:
1) Omega-based subtheme, (nice and responsive)
2) Rethought admin UI (VBO enabled order and product management, dashboard with reporting).
3) Optional example content, and optional site structure (various content and product types, matching search api indexes, views, etc).
All this through slim and nicely separated features, so that you can easily disable the parts that you don't want (striping the install to its bare essentials if needed). And yes, we're targeting Search API from the very start, so that you can have powerful search & faceting out of the box if you want it.

Kickstart v2 is concentrating on physical and attribute products, we believe file downloads and other use cases are better served by new distros based on our Kickstart v2 work.
We also have emails, nicely styled color attributes (click the actual color instead of a radio with a label) and many other nice details.

We have a new discounts / coupons UI in progress allowing you to handle both from the same place. This will fit with a new commerce_coupons 7.x-2.x branch.

We discussed Stock, but won't have time to integrate it before the beta. Whether that will still happen before the final release depends on how much work the Stock module needs at this point. We are not shy of beta dependencies (plenty of time to create stable releases until the end of August), or writing things from scratch, thought at some point it's a question of time management and quality control (polish VS new things).

I hope this gets you a bit excited. We are only weeks away from the public beta (mid-June), so you'll soon have it in your hands, ready for testing and your contributions. We should be releasing a new wave of modules (discounts, custom order and product management, etc) in the next 7 days.
When that happens, I will update the issue summary.

perandre’s picture

@bojanz: Thanks for sharing your thoughts and plans! Quick comments:

1. Did you get a change to check out faralds' tab based admin navigation? Standarizing on how to navigate around in the shop admin is a good thing.
2. This installation profile is gonna be killer. But it would also be good to be able to simply "add shop functionality" to existing Drupal sites, without having to start from scratch with new profile. Any thoughts on this?

bojanz’s picture

2. This installation profile is gonna be killer. But it would also be good to be able to simply "add shop functionality" to existing Drupal sites, without having to start from scratch with new profile. Any thoughts on this?

Anyone is free to install Drupal Commerce & the contributed modules included in Kickstart on an existing install, and start that way.
It's more complicated and means the modules need to be setup manually (instead of Kickstart providing all the settings), but perfectly possible.

farald’s picture

@bojanz: yes it's indeed great and exiting news. :)
i had a look at the inline entity form, and it solves a lot of important issues when handling line items.
it seems like you are going to put most of the needed functionality into separate modules?

Im eager to know how you are setting up the administrative interface. Could you provide some early screenshots to aid in the discussion, and let us see what road it is taking?

farald’s picture

It's been 3 weeks.
Any progress on this issue?

bojanz’s picture

See http://commerceguys.com/blog/sneak-preview-commerce-kickstart-v2
The Kickstart v2 code is up on d.o git, and we are working on merging all pending work in time for the saturday demo (session on DrupalDevDays in Barcelona).

The order and product management will also be posted separately as the commerce_backoffice project on d.o.

lsolesen’s picture

This is great news, and what wonderful work you are doing. I do not see the http://drupal.org/project/commerce_backoffice yet?

bojanz’s picture

It's a sandbox. I'll promote it in the next 24h.

delta’s picture

Do you planned to release the V2 without the demo content creation (product type, blog, etc..) Or there is a simple way to do it in the actual release http://drupal.org/node/1605434 (i means clean install) ?

GuGuss’s picture

@delta : That feature is not done yet, so we disabled that option for now. Our plan is detailed here : #1634554: Provide a "without demo store content" installation for Kickstart. Don't hesitate to give feedbacks !

guy_schneerson’s picture

commerce_stock 7.x-1.0 is stable and would make a great addition.
It provides basic but solid functionality. If you think any issues are stooping it from making it in, let me know and ill do my best to fix them.

bojanz’s picture

I'd love to discuss that. I was under the impression that 2.x is where the fun is at, which is why I didn't pay much attention to 1.x.

guy_schneerson’s picture

bojanz fun = lots of things to do, but version 1 does most of what people need: stops the purchasing out of stock items and its stable.
Would be happy to discuss irc/sktpe/twitter.

bojanz’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

Unfortunately, Stock didn't make the cut for the initial 2.0 release, we're low on manpower.
There's always 2.1, and I'm very interested in approaching Stock then.

We are tagging beta1 of Kickstart v2 in the next 48h, and tagging an RC1 before Munich (which means Aug 17th / Aug 18th).
Beta blockers: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/commerce_kickstart?issue_tags=be...
RC blockers: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/commerce_kickstart?issue_tags=RC...

No need for this issue to stay alive. You're all still welcome to provide feedback, ideas, patches in the issue queue.

guy_schneerson’s picture

@bojanz good luck with the 2.0 release and would be happy to go over stock options after its release (i am around in Munich if you got time)

aem34’s picture

hello,

commerce kickstart 2.0 beta is great stuff,
but even if you don't make commerce files available,
could you please at least make "shipping" dependencies
not mandatory for commerce kickstart user, commerce kickstart product,
commerce kickstart lite product, commerce kickstart lite product zoom
& ui relative modules/features please ?

in order to be able to work on kickstart to sell files and/or services
based on that great easing interface...

aem34’s picture

for dependencies :
please could you also remove dependencies for the toolbar from
Commerce Kickstart User, Toolbar Megamenu, Commerce Kickstart Menus ?

if we want for instance the admin_menu, it looks like crap :)

bojanz’s picture

@aem34
Please open new issues for #17 and #18.
This is not the appropriate issue for what are otherwise valid suggestions.

Toolbar Megamenu and Commerce Kickstart menus need to depend on toolbar. Kickstart User doesn't.

realskorpion’s picture

Hi guys,

A decent "add customer review" module is a must for drupal commerce.
I hope to see one soon

Thanks

rszrama’s picture

I don't believe such a feature needs a separate module - you could just turn on comments with Fivestar ratings. : )

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

bruno33’s picture

Is the integration of stock still palnned ?

bojanz’s picture

Maybe next year.

bruno33’s picture

Ok, It's a pity cause i thinks that's a big lack but thanks for the quick reply and the great work, I'm looking forward to use drupalcommerce soon then.

bruno33’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Fixing links.