Drupal

Just some quick news about our site: we've made some upgrades and updates to our online store!

We're fully setup to take credit cards directly now, but y'all can still pay via Paypal if you want. The store is much faster now too, as well as being fully encrypted, signed, and verified. Running on the latest Drupal Ecommerce, we hope you find it a much better shopping experience than before.

We've also got some additional shipping options up there on our larger items (so you can see what our standard freight costs are prior to ordering) and we've been able to drop the price a little on our nice interactive LED coffee tables.

Check it out!

We'll be posting more items up on it soon, with some big surprises and new products hitting next month!

We have been getting ready for Maker Faire all week... and boy are we excited!

First off.... I am on the poster. So you have to come to Maker Faire and make fun of me.

And if you can't see those enormous dates down there, the faire is Sat. & Sun., the 19th and 20th.

Our shop and office are filled with stuff as we are bursting at the seems with all the things we have made. Make Make Make for the MAKER FAIRE!

We are going to be showing all the different kinds of things we can do, so we have tried to make examples of all of them. We will have a video projector and will be talking about our process and how we use the Shopbot, Revit, Illustrator, Blender and other tools to get the results we want.

We will be showing off some V-carving techniques:

3D carvings:

And other things!

Meet us there!

We'll be in Sequoia Hall this Saturday and Sunday... All Day!

We're very proud to finally have gotten our on-line store up and fully functional.

Check it out!

We're using the E-Commerce Module available for Drupal 4.7 which provides a ton of functionality. Shopping Cart, different types of Products, Shipping Calculator, Tax Calculator, and more. Great stuff!

This blog post is a very basic and short primer for getting up and started with a online store via Drupal, all the issues we ran into, and how we (mostly) solved them.

First off, you'll need to get the E-Commerce module, place it in your /Modules folder, and then activate it's various parts under Admin/Modules. You only need to activate a few parts to get it working, but as you'll see it's got a lot of parts. For example, we're not selling anything that's a down-loadable product, so we haven't turned on that module that allows for such products. But you'll want at least the Store, the Card, whatever Payment module you'll be using (ours is Paypal for now), the Shipping Calc, the Shipping API, and the various Product modules you'll need.

The Shopping Cart is just a Block, that will now be available on the admin/blocks page for you to configure. We just set ours to be in the upper left-hand corner, and to not show up unless there are items inside of it.

The Payment modules give Drupal the ability to talk to various billing systems. We're starting out small, so we just used the Paypal module. You just set up a Paypal merchant account, and then give the Paypal Payment module the details. Once done, Drupal can 'pass' the order info to Paypal automatically for you, and take the person there at the end of the checkout process for you too.

The Store module adds a ton of features and settings. It has it's own menu, which you'll need to go into to get to the Store settings. Here you can set your orgin for shipping, the language of your confirmation e-mails and such, and a whole lot more. You can also set up inventory management and more. We opted to keep it simple, so we just edited the language of the confirmation e-mails, set up the sales tax collection, and set our address for shipping.

The Shipping Modules allow you to set up an automated shipping calculator where you'll put in the information on your shippable products their weight and dimensions and it will give the customer different shipping options, with prices, and let them pick which one they want and then it adds it to the order cost automatically. You have to first set up what Shipping services you want to use.

The various Product Modules add Drupal-standard Nodes that represent your products. Most of the time it's One Node = One Product, but there are special Product types that allow for configurable products, collections of products, subscriptions, and more. So to make a Product for your site you'll go to the standard 'Create Content' page, and pick your project type there, and Drupal will then give you what amounts to an extended 'Page' node, where you've got a title, body, and any other 'special' fields other Modules are giving your other Drupal pages, but with the added Shipping options, prices, availability, and more.

Sounds easy yeah? So then, Here are the issues we ran into, and how we solved them:

• First off, the shipping calculator will only work for UPS, even though other shipping options show up as available. If you know PHP mojo you can get other services to work, and apparently it's under development, but we just decided to go with UPS for the time being.

• Second, there's a strange problem we hit with the Taxes being figured in. They don't see to work unless the Customer has made a Drupal account on your site. This lead to...

• Third, we wanted to have our customers sign in, so that we have their info and such and it's not just anonymous, but Drupal normally requires a long and confirmation e-mail process. No customer is going to sign up, then go back to their e-mail, and then back to our site, and then finish their order. Enter in the Login Toboggan Module, which allows for someone to sign up and get instant access to your Drupal site. Buy simply setting up Login Toboggan to allow for someone to sign up without the confirmation e-mail, and then setting it to take them back to their shopping cart once they have signed up, it solved the problem. Now a customer just needs to click Checkout, give us their info, pick their shipping, and then get passed onto Paypal for payment.

• Fourth, the standard 'Product' page is a problem, for it shows the standard node 'teaser' which is usually just the first 'x' number of characters of the Node itself. So you'd wind up with silly and incomplete product listings on the store page, and we wanted control of that to make a nice Product page. Enter in the Excerpt Module. This allows you to set a separate Teaser for a Drupal Node, so that you can make nice, short product descriptions with a small photo for the Products page, yet have a full length page with nice big photos for the actual product description node.

So, by combining together a few Drupal Modules, we were able to build ourselves a nice, solid, and stable e-commerce store for free that integrates seamlessly with the rest of our site. Viva la Drupal!

Sadly, now that it looks like I've got more than two readers, and we've gotten a actual high-falutin' Google pagerank going (woo hoo! it's currently a '2'! We've hit the big time!), we've also been getting our comments auto-spammed. Blind, automated systems try to find Drupal sites with comments turned on, and if they are successful in making a comment, it will then go on to make a whole lot more comments. With lots of links. To that fine spamming standard of 'enlargement' pills. Lovely. First time this happened it hit about 150 comments before we caught it.

One easy way to stem this off that we've got available is to simply make the comments moderated, so they have to be approved prior to going live. This makes it appear to 'fail' to the blind system trying to generate the comment (for it gets stuck in the que, instead of posting to the page), so it will only make one comment, which you can easily delete, and then it will appear to leave you alone in the future.

There are several other available systems that we're researching, and I'll post about those when we've got them working. But until then, please, please post your comments, and they will go live once we've had a chance to check that it's not Spam. While the comments page should tell you this, some folks have been confused as to why their comment doesn't show up. It's not that we don't love you, we do, we just have to screen the comments now so it might take a little while for your comment to appear...

Drupal, the CMS that runs this site, is a powerful and flexible open-source CMS. It's the bees knees, and it takes care of all the back end stuff so that we can just focus on making the site look nice, and adding the content to it (blog posts, products, images) to make it ours. No Dreamweaver or custom HTML, and being able to edit it from anywhere, this thing rocks (even if it's got a strange name).

Today, I'm going to post an intro to Themes for Drupal. Most of the info out there I've found about this topic is squarely targeted at web developers, and as such, it's over the head of regular folks who just want a nice site.

First, let's briefly talk about how Drupal works:
Drupal is a LAMP-based CMS system. All this means is that it's a live application that lives on a webserver, handling and serving up web pages. Every time someone looks at your site, Drupal creates a page on the fly and gives it to them, following whatever rules you set up.

Now, there are two sets of rules, so to speak. What's shown where, the chosen content of your site, are set within Drupal's admin page. Things like what to put in the sidebars, and what order you want things in, and what you want to use as a footer or the links up at the top of the page, or what pages you want to show up when someone first comes to the site.

However, all of this stuff is (mostly) separate from how it looks. This is the 'content', not the 'presentation'. A second set of rules control how things look, and these rules are within the Theme. Drupal just follows whatever rules the Theme tell it to in regards to color, font size, graphics, edges, borders, and even width and placement of things.

So, when someone looks at your website, Drupal creates a page with the desired content, and then themes it to match the desired presentation, and in the end you wind up with a nice web page that was made for you (and is managed for you, as well, so changes are really easy).