After Midnight, we’re Gonna Let it All Hang Out

Truly going to need more monkeys

Yes. I’m supposed to be sleeping. I may be nocturnal by nature, but a “day job” is just that!

No, I’m not supposed to be blogging when I have work to be done. No, I shouldn’t have to do work after midnight. But I do!

The Seven Principles of Web Design

As explained by magicians Penn & Teller:

URLs are Penn & Teller’s “switch” — it’s well understood that I can switch elements just by pointing to a link, never-you-mind clicking! And with AJAX, we have a complete browser within a browser for switching out content. And the kicker? The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James (Garrett)! So, you know that deception is involved!

Please add your ideas on the correlations between in the comments!

A couple of notes on Ubercart

In the past few weeks, my co-workers and I, have been working feverishly on several ecommerce websites all at once. Of course, that sort of statement alone should tell you a great deal about how hard it is to juggle projects sometimes. When dealing with shopping carts online there are many solutions and most of them are bad. When dealing with shopping carts that are apart of the Drupal platform, there are only a couple of choices and so far, neither one seems to be all that wonderful.

Ubercart has been our man in the corner for a few sites now and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier with age, rather tough and Clint Eastwood esc. There is something rather difficult and obtuse about configuring the Ubercart features around some usual suspects. These bad performers are none other than; Taxonomy, Views, CCK and the aforementioned beast Ubercart. Now as a concession to those of you out there who are Ubercart wizards, I have not assembled a million sites using this combination yet so my experience is some what limited, but in terms of getting Uber to do anything short of standard product display there are some hurdles with variations of the viewable output. 

Like most things that involve configuration there are some loathed levels of trial and error before anything substantial occurs. For whatever reason there seemed to be some conflicts or repetition of output coming from the combination of Views, Taxonomy, CCK and Pathauto. For some strange reason it seemed that when we set one block view output for the products there would be a second level block view that did not follow the same rules as the first. 

Some of this could possibly be caused by the depth or complexity of the products themselves (and for some reason the fly fishing industry has an abundance of). The product breakdowns were required to host a parent product profile that would list variant child products, in a tabular list for easy reference per the client. One thing to note about this specific functionality, the entire site was supposed to be built on Magento originally but after some issues regarding development and co-ordinating with a contractor, it was put to bed for Drupal. That said, Drupal is not a shopping cart by default and so any work we do to add in that functionality will always be lacking in some way. 

Advanced browsing and product output can be controlled in some sense using these modules in combination but there are some output issues that make it frustrating. Drupal is very versatile and I am surely not complaining about its robust features, but it does have its limits. I think that it is time for a few developers to get together and design from the Drupal Framework Up, a shopping cart software that can handle content integration smoothly and incorporate some node type modules that are specific to Drupal. 

Although out of the box Ubercart does have enough ponies to manage simple products, a truly robust, reliable and flexible shopping cart solution is really needed. There are plenty of well developed and designed hosted solutions out there that can do the job we were looking for but as far as carts go from the Open Source community, there should be a decent software out there that isn’t a train wreck.

Sincerely, 

the bitterly jaded web guy, Zach