The problem with Ubercart

As I got to know Drupal and Ubercart better, I realised what an extraordinary thing a rambling open source project is. Anyone could suggest a module - whether they're a trained developer who writes a manual to go with it or a DIY hack like myself who finds something that works for them and releases it as a favour. It is possible to spend quite a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the system.

After a month or two experimenting with Ubercart, I realised I was not alone. I was not the only person who couldn't make the shipping modules work. All I needed was three zones and a weight option, but apparently this involved things called Conditional Actions and a large amount of work, so better to wait until the new version of the cart came out that did away with them altogether. Or the favoured option seemed to be to move to emmigrate to the USA where there is a USPS and a Fedex module written in great detail with every combination of speed and state sales tax and tracking. Maybe someone would write something - even a simple thing - that covered three zones and a dozen or so weights, but the developers who worked on Ubercart seemed to be looking forward to something new. They'd noticed that ramshackle nature of Drupal  6 and Ubercart for those who have a problem to solve and are searching the forums. There was a new Drupal coming out any moment. I just had to wait a little while. Everything would be fine.

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Last year: installing Drupal

Company history

2010 was a special year for Oyster Bay Systems, celebrating 25 years in the commercial and consumer finance industries.

Oyster Bay has helped finance companies gain profitability and efficiency for over 25 years with an expanding portfolio of products and services that is used throughout the UK, offshore financial communities and in Europe.

Since winning their first contract a quarter of a century ago, Oyster Bay has grown consistently and steadily with its clients, empowering them to exploit opportunities and to achieve success. Oyster Bay's experience and range of products means it can provide the most appropriate system at each stage of a client company’s growth.

Michael Breach, Managing Director explains "We are committed to adding business value, providing guaranteed support and services throughout project development, implementation and beyond".

Oyster Bay prides itself in taking a true partnership approach in the way in which it works with its current and future customers. It is this approach that has forged successful long term relationships and placed Oyster Bay as the preferred choice for many companies over the years.

As a software company that came into being during the 1980s, Oyster Bay has a distinct advantage in that it has evolved expertise and experience in response to many changes in the marketplace and to the legislative and regulatory demands of the times.

Michael Breach said "I formed the company as a consultancy in 1983 writing software on Apple II computers.

It soon became apparent that asset lenders were a niche badly in need of the benefits of computerisation. He explained: “it was pure chance that our initial clients were asset finance companies. They were using legacy systems usually comprising mainframe computers or even Kalamazoo-style ledger card mechanical tabulator, and it is sobering to think that there were hardly any spreadsheets or word processors to be seen anywhere.”

An early client for Oyster Bay was Lloyds Bowmaker, which in 1983 commissioned Oyster Bay to develop a system for its joint venture with Caterpillar in Saudi Arabia. Michael recalled “We developed the software, which was an Apple II based CP/M networked system, and shipped it out to Saudi Arabia, all suitably conformed to Sharia Law.”

A series of other new customers included Weston Acceptances, Larch Finance, Lancashire Leasing and the DC Cook Group. Michael recalled that “Client demand was mainly for administration systems including a route right through to collection procedures. At the same time, since we were obtaining consumer credit information for an increasing range of lending organisations, and since demand for payment profile information was on the increase, we fought to introduce the first consortium for consumer credit data submissions to UAPT which later became Equifax. This bureau facility is going strong today under the Profile Data Services label, and sends data to all three major UK credit bureau from a wide range of subscribers, big and small.”

Oyster Bay’s offices were located at Swansea University’s Innovation Centre. In the early days this provided excellent shared reception and conference facilities, more importantly unlimited access to the University’s academic and computing departments proved very valuable. Michael said “When we eventually moved to larger premises we stayed close to the university since the advantages were still so obvious.”

A significant breakthrough for the company came about following senior staff changes at NatWest’s Centrefile bureau which had been running asset-finance portfolios for several years. The result was that Oyster Bay came to inherit some 90 per cent of the Centrefile’s client base. Michael said: “one such was Lombard, which today is still using our software in its Marine, Channel Isle and Manx divisions.”

A further event that propelled the company forward was winning the contract to supply Volvo Financial Services with the first installation of the pioneering Vienna system. "Looking back," says Michael, "this was the turn of the century, the internet was still basically an unknown force, and yet despite the difficulties surrounding the nascent techhnology, the project was completed very quickly and successfully. In my mind, it was a perfect example of the true meaning of 'the partnership approach', with both parties playing an active, positive and collaborative part in achieving the common goals."

Although Oyster Bay has a number of products and services, Vienna remains the flagship system, and has been adopted by a number of significant lenders within the UK and in Europe as the 100% web based enterprise level system that is both fully functional and proven. Vienna provides straight-through processing with in-built workflow management features that control the movement of a proposal from point of sale, through to underwriting, payout and into ‘go-live’, all in real-time.

Michael explains that “Vienna came about as a result of the need to progress from systems in Microsoft DOS. The way forward seemed unclear at first and as we had determined that it would not be sensible to go the route of early Windows based systems, we spent some time in evaluating current platforms and attempting to forecast the future.

It seemed probable, even at this early stage in the internet’s development, that the adoption of web-based systems would benefit clients. The end result was the development of a new front office underwriting system.”

Vienna has recently been introduced into Volvo Financial Services’ Service Centre, North West Europe region, with one of the main goals being to have a single back office system capable of managing all of the North West region operations. This expansion means that Vienna is now being used to manage the UK, Southern Ireland and Netherlands (which includes a Russian division) portfolios. Michael said “I am pleased to say that the team, again by working in close collaboration with VFS’s staff, migrated the Southern Ireland and Netherlands portfolios onto Vienna in a very short space of time. ”.

In the financial services marketplace, which has become acutely cost conscious, systems efficiency is a core business requirement, and Oyster Bay Systems has an established pedigree in serving the client, with a strong reputation for “getting it right”. The company delivers a compelling business proposition with high-quality off the shelf and tailored software solutions in a timely, cost-effective and efficient way.

Oyster Bay has a range of solutions to manage portfolios of any size and all product types with end to end processing. It provides powerful, robust, scalable and secure solutions to support business requirements. These solutions can be used in-house or as hosted services, where shared cost access to on-line credit and asset search facilities is available.

Oyster Bay never lose sight of the fact that “less can be more” for clients and end users. They believe that systems should be simple to use, transparent, flexible and proven. They should have the functionality to improve manual processes whilst delivering answers to issues raised by the challenging and constantly changing regulatory framework.

New technologies that focus on how information and its surrounding processes are managed rather than simply on data capture and reporting are now central to Oyster Bay's proposition for the rest of the decade.

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change of subject
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This page used to be about installing Drupal but there are auto installers now...
I don't remember why, I just remember a lot of FTP installs of Drupal 6.




Drupal is no ordinary program to install. It talks to you on little notes attached in "readme.txt" files next to other files that have to be uploaded. It plays tricks on you, asking you to install new modules into a folder called

/sites/all/modules

rather than a more appealing folder called

/modules

which is just put there like a mermaid to distract seafairers.




Even when you have your modules in the right place, there file called default.settings.php which has to be renamed .settings.php and there are various read/write permissions which have to be changed temporarilly.




There's another thing. Drupal comes with its own installer that you look at through a browser on your web site. It asks the route to your database and one or two other things I've now forgotten for Drupal 6. I have never had to press the onscreen buttons that my server provides to set-up a database before, nor given it a username and pass, nor thought how to describe a route to it. Localhost did in in the end, but the permutations of things that can go wrong took over a month to work-through.


Blog on a single page from Veganline.com the vegan shoe shop

Last year: choosing a shopping cart

It all seems a long time ago now, but at some point I must have chosen to install a shopping cart on Drupal.

• Speed of loading
• Flexibility
• Price

Were all sensible grown-up reasons to do such a thing. Speed was meant to be good for search engine placement. I don't know if the current shopping cart is still fast but I am past caring - it was just a good idea at the time, that's all.

Price was important at the time because I wasn't selling anything. The price of a Drupal web designer looked proposterous. Even if I'd be slower and more amateur, a DIY job was the only way to save money. Again, I'm just saying this seemed a good idea at the time.

Lastly, Drupal-based carts are flexible. If you have different sales points to tag different products with, Drupal can work around this. A similar cart, Joomla with Virtuemart, allowed "manufacturer" and "brand" or some such hard-wired tags and everything else had to go in the text. This was no way to carry-on, so that's how bits of life began to revolve around this droplet-like group of programs, sometimes one at a time, and never all working together at once in a way that sold things like a shop.

Similar post from 2015:
Free Fast and Pretty: choosing a shopping cart

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Tone image and rank versus fact

Oh dear this page has gone funny

how you can build a taxonomy-based product catalog in drupal commerce

This is an attempt to follow the instructions, as attempts to install Commerce Kickstart have failed.

how you can build a taxonomy-based product catalog in drupal commerce

If you look over here in my sidebar you will see that I have a catalog bloc

On the mouse curser moving over this block, a dotted rectangle shows round it on the screen and an editing link like a cogwheel on the top right. If you set-up a site and log-in as administrator, the cogwheel will link you to the admin menu for that bloc or go via admin > structure > blocs and remember what it is called in that theme..

that lists out catalog catagories ["coffee holders", "conference swag", and "wearables"]
...that are actually Taxonomy Terms linking them to their Taxonomy Term Pages:
http://demo.commerceguys.com/dc/catalog/coffee-holders
[this shows differently on the video because it shows the site when logged-on as admin. For admin, the term page shows a coffee holder with two tabs, "view" "edit", a paragraph describing the coffee mug and an add-to-cart form with a drop-down list, that moves your page from the one about black mugs to white mugs]

Looking over here at the sidebar I see 

-coffee holders, description

--commerce guys mug in white, image, description, $10.00

---"read more" screen has a drop down menu for white or black and an add-to-cart button

-conference swag, description

--messenger bag, image, description, $15---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button

--keyring pen, image of 3 pens, description, $4---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button

-wearables, description

--cap, image, description $12---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button

--T shirt called "e-commerce with Drupal", description, $8---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button and select button options S, M, L, XL

--T shirt called "looking for smiling faces", description, $8---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button and select button options S, M, L, XL

--T shirt called "all tied-up", description, $8---"read more" screen has an add-to-cart button and select button options S, M, L, XL

[Taxonomy]-Term Pages in Drupal 7 have been enhanced a little bit, allowing you to specify
♦custom urls, [eg example.com/coffee-holders] allowing you to
♦display a discription on a page, and giving you
♦both a view and a quick edit link here to edit the Taxonomy Term settings.
This particular one - Coffee Holders - has the description and it shows all of my -er different coffee holder products on the demo website.

This ["read more" link under the mug picture] is just a Node Teaser List of Product Display Nodes. The Product Display Node being a special node type that I've made that has both a
♦ Product Reference Field on it, that turns into this handy dynamic Add To Cart Form, and then it also has a
♦ Taxonomy Term Reference Field on it,
which you can see here lets me to tag this [Product Display] Node with a particular taxonomy term and links it back to its term page.
http://demo.commerceguys.com/dc/catalog/coffee-holders/mug

1 Create a taxonomy vocabulary

Now if you wanted to build something like this yourself, the first thing you would need to do, is to create a taxonomy vocabulary for your catalog:
example.com/catalog/coffee-holders/mug#overlay=admin/structure/taxonomy
admin>structure>taxonomy>edit vocabulary [pictures at about 1'24" on the video]
So you can see here my catalog vocabulary, and if we look at the terms I've listed, my three terms are each present, and each one of them has a name, a description, and a custom url alias that just provides a nice search engine friendly url for this term page on the front.

2 Go build a menu; enable a bloc

Once you've listed out each of your taxonomy terms, the next step is to go build a menu for this.
So I'm going to go to stucture>menus, and you can see here that I have a catalog menu, where I have manually added links to each of the term pages.
[screen shows remembered "search engine friendly url" typed into the box. This can be found by going back to >structure>taxonomy>edit vocabulary to cut-and-paste]
Er - Whenever you create these links you can actually use the search engine friendly path that you have defined, and whenever you save this menu link, it will be converted to the actual Drupal path that has been assigned to that taxonomy term.
Whenever you create a menu you automatically get a block, that you can then enable, to show that menu in any of your sidebars. Here ...
structure>blocks [first option on the structure tab]
...you can see my catalog menu block has been placed into the first sidebar. This is a region in the Corolla theme which now has to be installed after Adaptive Themes Core. Once installed it has a tab on the blocks menu. From that tab you see the options shown in the video, where shopping cart, catalog, user menu and user login are all selected for the first sidebar, and I've configured this bloc...
[from the "configure" link on the "catalog" line]
...to not appear on checkout pages - notice I've used checkout asterisk so it will block all of the checkout pages, so that whenever you go to checkout and are in any step of the checkout process, er you do not have a sidebar. I did this to reduce distraction and noise on the checkout form so that the customer doesn't have distraction and when they're trying to complete the checkout process and give you their nolas.
Once you have
♦ built the taxonomy vocabulary,
♦ the menu item,
♦ put your bloc in place...

3 Create a Product node type

the next step is to actually have nodes showing-up in your teaser lists. Drupal Commerce will install a default product type whenever you first enable everything.
store>products second tab is "product type"
On this demo site I also have a T shirt product type, um, for my T-shirt products, er: I'll discuss that in a different screencast [about sized products].
Once you have product types though, the next step is to create a product display node type. So I'm going to go to my Content Types menu.
structure>content type second option on the structure list
You see here I have a product display node type, and the reason being: even though I have product types in the back end, I can list out all the products on my website on the back end, there is no automatic point of display for them on the front end. We've separated-out the front end from the back end in Drupal Commerce, er so that you have a lot more freedom to detirmine how you want to display products to your customers. Whether it's through product display nodes as I am , or some other method involving Views, or Pagemanager and Panels, or something else entirely!

If we look at the fields that I have put on this product display node type, you can see both my product reference field, and my [Taxonomy] Term reference field.

I like the autocomplete textfield widget...https://drupal.org/project/autocomplete_widgets...because it lets me enter products on this node, using the product SKU with the product title with an autocomplete. And I can have as many as I want to, without having to bother with the multi-select select list, or perhaps just an overwhelming checkboxes list if you have many products on the website.
I also have a catalog catagory term reference select list.
So what you do is:
whenever you add a term reference field, you have to choose which vocabulary this is for, and then of course the widget select list autocomplete radios [radio buttons] so that on the product page - which I'll go to this right now - um so that on its edit form, you get to specify how exactly... - I'm denoting which catalog catagory this belongs to. So you can see here my Product Reference Field with the autocomplete, my catalog term reference field with the select list, and again how this is presented on the front end, with an add to cart form, and a link going back to the term page.

Well those are all the things that you need to know [sic], to build your taxonomy-based Drupal Commerce product catalog. Let me pull-up a .pdf here that shows you the different steps: [in a different order on screen]

♦ Create a "Catalog" taxonomy vocabulary, with terms for each of your categories.
♦ Create a "Product display" node type using a product reference field and a term reference field, and create nodes for your products.
♦ Create a "Catalog" menu and display its block.

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Blog on a single page from Veganline.com the vegan shoe shop