Book Preview: Getting Started With Drupal Commerce
Are you looking for a way to learn about the most powerful open source ecommerce solution ever built? Yes EVER. :) Do you want clear steps on how to build your first ecommerce store with Drupal Commerce?
Richard Jones has the solution for you with his book ‘Getting Started with Drupal Commerce’. He will take you by the hand and show you the fundamental steps needed to build your first online shop built with Drupal Commerce. At the end of the book you’ll have a fully functional digital shop to sell products with. You can make money by selling your own products, or even by selling the entire shop to a client. It is up to you. Drupal Commerce gives you the power to do it, and Richard Jones puts you at the steering wheel.
Note: I had the privilege to review the book technically. It was an awesome experience! This blogpost is totally biased and yes, IF there seem to be logical Drupal steps missing in the howto, I mistakenly assumed you would ‘get it‘ without it being explicitly said - totally my bad ;) Thank you people at PacktPub (especially you Vineeta, Akash and Nikhil C.) and writer Richard Jones for making this happen and giving me this opportunity.
What the book covers
The building blocks
The book starts by learning you Drupal Commerce’s basic building blocks: the fundamental modules needed for building a Drupal Commerce site and other key terminology.
Basic installation and setting up your development environment
Knowing what is what, you’ll get the neccesary actionsteps to install the neccesary Drupal Commerce modules into your own development environment, that will serve as the basis for your next steps to Drupal Commerce mastery.
Planning your store
In this chapter you’ll learn how to plan your store. Good planning gives you great insight into what you want the details of the store to look like. You’ll get great tips about the things you don’t want to forget getting right.
Configuring products and the product catalog
Next up is building your stores product structure and your product catalog. Drupal Commerce has VERY flexible Product Entities that you can customize the way you see fit for your store. Reading this chapter will give you insight in how to do that.
The shopping Cart
Chapter 5 is all about setting up the shopping cart. In a couple of clear steps you’ll learn how you can enable your customers to add products to the cart and proceed to checkout.
Checkout
Checkout pages are highly customizable in Drupal Commerce. Chapter 6 shows you how to customize the checkout pages and how to add a payment gateway to them. It has valuable tips about the advantages and disadvantages of certain choices: great knowledge that you can apply immediately.
Shipping the goods
Next up is shipping: this allows your customers to enter their shipping information and you’ll be able to charge them for shipping the goods. You’ll learn how to setup flexible rules and conditions for calculating shipping costs.
Setting up Taxes
Taxes. Nobody really loves them, but as they say in the Netherlands ‘Taxes: We can’t make them more fun, but we can make them easier’. The Tax system in Drupal Commerce allows you to setup complex tax system in the easiest way possible. The book guides you with setting them up, so you don’t mess up and the tax man comes knocking on your door. :)
Managing the store
Drupal Commerce has great features for shop managers. Building a great way to manage orders can be benificial to you if you’re the shop’s manager, and can make your client very happy if you’re building it with their daily tasks in mind. This chapter learns you all about the basics of setting up a backoffice system for the store manager.
Discounts and coupons
The last chapter is about giving your customers what they want: discounts! :) It learns you about a Drupal Commerce discount system and how to be able to accept coupons. All highly configurable and flexible.
Become a Superhero
If you’re starting from scratch without any experience with Drupal or Drupal Commerce: you’ll feel like a superhero after reading and applying the contents of this book and realising what you can do. Awesome Drupal Commerce sites are totally within your reach. The next step is up to you.
The book is available at Packtpub, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Safari Books Online.
Read more about the book at http://www.packtpub.com/getting-started-with-drupal-commerce/book.
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