Sunday 1 April 2012

Ubercart 3 for Drupal 7 has instructions (except for shipping modules outside the USA)

If you search amazon you will find an ebook about setting up Ubercart 3 on Drupal 7.  I'm backdating this post so it looks up to date.

I bought a copy and worked-through the .pdf highlighting the end of each instruction I had completed. It gets a bit tricky when the text talks about sales, because it starts by giving instructions for downloads, then by giving instructions for physical goods and skating-over the problem of 100 countries in 4 zones with say 3-20 price bands that you want to set for each. I can't review the last bit as I haven't read it yet, but progress now seems possible.
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Friday 16 March 2012

I now have two boots products on my front page, with variations. It's the typing of products with commas between them in a little box somewhere that does the trick. In the course of uploading these products in 12 sizes I seem to have uploaded twelve identical pictures too.

Meanwhile I want to do funky 360 degree spins. How to get there?

Step one: search hard disk and email archive for previus attempts. Find http://www.magictoolbox.com/magic360/modules/cscart/ on the web and an email refernce to me buying their magiczoom thing 4 years ago. It doesn't do image spins but anything that's better than two mis-shapen photos of shoes would be a start. Do I have a username or whatever it takes? I've installed the zip module from the web and nothing happens. Maybe I need to find out more.

Step two: search for free alternatives and find Professer Cloud, who's work is Drupalised on https://drupal.org/project/cloud_zoom by Nicholas Thompson. There is some complication about adding lines of code because of a fear of MIT licences. This is frustrating because I am poking in hope of success rather than understanding what I do, and any complication makes success very unlikely.

On the subject of frustration, I saw that Professer Cloud's work is used on a number of sites and happened to pick one with a very good video educational video for Boyz: Click somewhere away from work and non-boyz who might be unsympathetic
http://content.bitsontherun.com/previews/qYkYwiCW-t7UzaS4G
PS If I have got another boy into trouble for posting this link, may I say in his defence that this is mainly a blog about highly productive software which with time and effort can sometimes be self-taught and developed to do more than Word, like run the Whitehouse web site or whatever. So this isn't a rude site your colleague / spouse / pupil was watching, honest. These things are serious to us boyz and deserve a link, that's all.


1.4.12
The various servers I've been testing Drupal on tend to run out of space and memory, so subtleties are abandoned until I learn how to work Drupal on my own hard disk, develop, and then upload. The first part is explained by Tom Geller on a post below called "getting started". I managed last night, but this morning can't see how to retrace steps and get the site on the screen

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Wednesday 29 February 2012

http://drupalzombie.com

Drupalzombie.com seems to know about how to put Drupal 7 files in the right place. If not I will delete this post or cover it in zombie slime.
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Friday 24 February 2012

Today I learned something new: Drupal on shared hosting OK

Thanks whoever commented on the post below:
  • Overlay
  • Dashboard
  • Context Links (this required by Commerce I think but I can skip the other two)
save a lot of memory if disabled.

Thanks whoever posted on https://drupal.org.uk/node/322
  • Several shared hosts do survive the memory demands of Drupal
  • There's one in North Carolina that specialises in Drupal and one in Purley. The thread attracts some people who want support email or phone support and some who have someone else to pay the bill, so it's hard to compare recommendations.
  • Meanwhile Heliohost.org enable one free account per user if it's active. The server is a testbed rather than a hotbed, with maximim add-ons and minimal constraints but 205 other users - few of them active - which this tool shows on a machine in Sacremento, California, routed via Frankfurt to me here in London.
Thanks to two pieces I've skim-read a bit at the start and still learned from.
  • I discovered caching for Drupal.
    "Shared server - no Varnish, no Memcache or APC" on a "case study disaster" told at Drupaldownunder was the clue. Now I know how a database driven site can be made to work as well as a plain html site: you add a cache so that it becomes almost an html site. I have managed to install Memcache; Varnish might not be ready for novices yet and one called "Boost" requries a snippet of .php added to the settings file. Does this need the opening and closing tags? Best avoided for novices just for a while. Evan as I type this I discover "content delivery networks" from skim-reading parts of the same lecture timetable. If I type ".nyud.net" after the domain part of the host for these apes, they load quicker!
  • I discovered that Drupal doesn't let you delete the settings.php file from a previous installation unless you use an FTP program to do it. Discovered from a blog in Australia - just a glance at the first couple of paragraphs confirmed the problem and its solution.
  • https://drupal.org/node/326504 about scalability looks relevant
So. Lots of little things come right in the world sometimes and I will not try to get a job as a bonobo monkey ape in a zoo.


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Tuesday 21 February 2012

Drupal 7 doesn't work on cheap hosting. (This is a secret designed to annoy people when they discover).

This is the conclusion I have reached after loads of developer videos failed to tell me: they use dedicated servers or their own hard discs.

The problem seems to be memory limits which have risen by mistake for no particular reason. Just as a Ryan Schama talks about "project creep" in his lecture, Drupal 7 has a Server Memory Creep towards needing an expensive host which nobody advertised or planned: it just happened and caught a lot of people out.

For those on the borderline there are three cacheing products

I find this frustrating because I did a bit of research over a year ago, trying to find out how to make a low-magin, loss making business sell more and at the time Drupal 6 / Ubercart was the fastest-loading software and I searched for days to find the fastest cheapest host. Now the calculation is a different one which rules out this host and this whole school of software together, and probably Drupal software altogether. I have spent over a year trying to learn the XYZ thing while shopping carts have forked and re-built themselves. Now I discover that I should have gone with Virtuemart in the first place. Such is life. If you read about an american going crazy and shooting people in a shopping mall, maybe they had just tried to install Drupal. Or maybe it was looking at the awful overpriced stock in TKMAX that did it. One of the two.

What other annoying things are there in life? Youth is wasted on the young? Trades unions let you down when you get an unfair dismissal? Radio station editors don't like news or music? Maybe I should petend to be a Bonobo Monkey and live in a park where zoo keepers will feed me.

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Monday 6 February 2012

Ubercart 3 is go
  • Ubercart 3 more-or-less mostly installs from my one-click Drupal installer and then trying to download one module at a time. Now the essential modules are installed I'm beginning to get fatal memory errors dispute a php.ini file saying that memory ought to be 128MB; I should work down the list of hacks in case something else works.
  • Ubercart 3 still expects complex shipping to be done with a module from the shipping company, which Royal Mail does not supply. I read that you can contribute a country, or maybe edit an existing one, to turn it into Europe or Worldwide which are the two overseas Royal Mail zones. From there it should be possible to write a shipping quote by weight.
  • Ubercart 3 doesn't have any books published about it on Amazon, but it seems pretty similar to Ubercart 2 except that it uses Drupal's standard Rules, apparently, and there is a knobbly bit on the side of a block that is something to do with editing. Probably lots of other things.
  • Someone has written about the two programs in a piece that I haven't read or made sense of -
    http://www.markroyko.com/blog/2011/12/14/ubercart-3-vs-drupal-commerce?utm_source=The+Weekly+Drop&utm_campaign=f26f5aec6a-The_Weekly_Drop_Issue_14_12_22_2011&utm_medium=email
Update 11.2013: Ubercart guides

  • Drupal 7 Ubercart 3 Ecommerce Manual by David Ipswich is a quick guide

  • Ubercart.org list videos by Peter Yarowski some of which are transcribed on this blog

  • Drupal 7 for Dummies (second edition) has an Ubercart 3 chapter which I have not read

For Drupal Commerce

  • Building E-Commerce Sites with Drupal Commerce Cookbook [Paperback]


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Tuesday 31 January 2012

Installation: possible?


Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 85 bytes) in /home/veganlin/public_html/X/includes/menu.inc on line 3669

This is what happens if I install Drupal 7 from my web host's installation aid, something like Fantastico or Scriptulicious, and then install each of the modules required for Drupal Commerce. I pick one that has little else depending on it - I think it was advanced help - and I get a Fatal error. From experience, I think it's possible to use control+backarrow and have another go. Sometimes the thing installs second or third time. But this is not going to be a reliable site.

The other way of installing Commerce is what the 25 minutes lecture below suggests. I tried importing the database this morning and got an error message, which is odd because I think it has worked before:
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2011/12/uploaded-database-i-used-import-from.html

It looks as though the hardest problem with Drupal 7 is going to be squeezing it onto cheap server space and finding ways to install without overloading the memory. There is some other system I've read about but know nothing about - I don't quite remember even what it's called - is it Drush and is that the answer?
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