Tuesday, 24 May 2011
From March 14th until May 10th, the Krimson dojo had two interns under its' roof. Yves Van Laer and Els Wens, both last year students at the Lessius Hogeschool Mechelen, were trained and guided by Roel De Meester, to become 'Krimson certified' Drupal ninjas in 8 weeks.
Their mission? Realizing a new website for the Belgian label Chicken Rhythm, specialized in a unique and colorful kids collection of T-shirts, rucksacks and iron-ons.
Chicken Rhythm currently consists of two separate websites: a webshop and a related blog. Krimson was asked to build a flexible and redesigned website integrating both. The overall aim was to improve the ease-of-use regarding maintenance and content management, adding a few new features and, of course, giving a new fun and fresh look.
Building the Chicken Rhythm site was a perfect case for our trainees to get an insight look in the project chain from A to Z: perform a bit of information architecture with the client, whip up some mockups, learn how to interpret wireframes, install and configure Drupal, perform some PHP coding, HTML/CSS markup and create a design (assisted by ninja Kristof Orts).
The realization of the website was also an appropriate case to explore and test the Drupal Commerce module, a professional e-commerce solution for Drupal 7. After thorough testing of the module, using it to build the webshop, our interns came to the conclusion that the current released version (7.x-1.0-beta3) is not (yet) sufficient for 'out of the box'-use.
They presented their findings at our krewmeeting. You can find their presentation at Slideshare [Sorry, only in Dutch].
There's still some work to be done on the site, before we'll launch it in the near future.
We wish our interns Yves and Els all the best with their future ventures!
Meet you in the Drupal Pond!?
Thanks for the gift basket and home made ice cream!
Zénobe Grammestraat 34
+32(0) 3 298 69 98
teach your interns english :)
teach your interns english :)
Presentation in Dutch
Good point - we generally make our presentations in English, but since this presentation was for internal use only, we allowed them to do it in Dutch...
Next time it will be in English.
About Drupal Commerce
About your conclusion that Drupal Commerce (7.x-1.0-beta3) is not (yet) sufficient for 'out of the box'-use.
Could you please tell what is missing, and what you decided to use instead of Commerce (or in addition to it)
I'm in the process to develop a site much like the one you refer to, multilingual with e-commerce, and I wuold like to avoid any obvious hurdles. I tried to understand the dutch slides, but it's too much for me :-)
Ciao,
Angelo
Use ubercart for now, then
Use ubercart for now, then when Drupal Commerce is ready, use Views Data Export http://drupal.org/project/views_data_export to move all your data over. Commerce can turn any type of content into a product (after-the-fact) vs. Ubercart cannot. The main part that is missing (in my opinion) is the ability to uninstall Commerce.
Great article Els, it just
Great article Els, it just describes what we have been doing the past 8 weeks.
There are some things I want to add: first, a big thumbs up to the team for helping us out whenever there were troubles, also a special thanks to Matthias (@Netsensei) for the lessons about the template.php files, tnid, module building, ... Second, I really like the atmosphere over at Krimson, it is a well-oiled machine :). Third, I bought the book "pro drupal development" for an even better understanding, so you will hear from me in the future ;).
@Angelo Turetta:
What was missing on Commerce at the time of our internship:
- there was not a progress bar available,
- you have got fields for billing information but not for "shipping information",
- you could not pay with bank transfer,
- commerce was not fully translatable, they forgot to t() some items
- you have to make a product for each different size/color... for example if you have 5 different sizes and 3 different colors... you have to make 15 items in the store and then combine those in your node... a lot of work :).
I haven't checked if these problems are gone now...
Post new comment