We had to make a tough decision early this year — which Drupal e-commerce package was right for us? There are currently two full e-commerce solutions for Drupal, eCommerce and Ubercart.

We chose Ubercart and jumped in with both feet. We’re happy to say that nine months later, this has definitely shown itself to be the right choice.

This post isn’t really going to discuss the technical merits or specific features of each option. This is better served by doing your own research on each one to see if there are any particular features that you need. What I’m going to focus on here are the less tangible aspects; things that we have since found to be clear indicators of the strength of Ubercart.

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration (and will be covering UC in their upcoming book), and Acquia’s registration for their beta service currently uses Ubercart. Support from key players like this has a lot of weight in the Drupal community.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve teamed up with Acquia to create new themes specifically for their upcoming distribution of Drupal, currently codenamed Carbon.  Dries and Jeff approached us in the spring about bundling TNT themes with their distribution, and we’ve been busily working behind the scenes over the summer to make this happen.

It was a natural match from the beginning, as both of our companies are focused on taking Drupal to the next level with a product that brings a huge amount of value to organizations.  Since this distribution will be GPL’d, it also gives us an opportunity to give themes back to the Drupal community. 

You’ll have to sign up for the beta in order to check out the first of the themes from TopNotchThemes that will be bundled with Acquia’s distribution.  Currently it’s in a private beta, but the doors will be opening further over the next month. I think you’ll be blown away by what Acquia has put together into a package that makes sense for both new and experienced Drupal users and service providers. 

Jay Wolf has been the key theme developer for this project, and he and Chris and I have been working closely with Acquia to craft designs and features that will benefit YOU the most!

Non-scary Drupal theming basics — CSS

Usually when you download and install a Drupal theme the first thing you want to do is customize the look and feel so it’s not so “templatey” (if that’s a word). It’s best to find a theme which has the layout you like and worry about the colors of fonts and backgrounds later as those can easily be changed in the theme’s “style.css” file.

The “style.css” file is located in the root directory of your theme files.

Changing the color of links

Link colors and styles are changed in your theme’s CSS file. Open up your theme’s “style.css” file and locate the code that looks similar to this:

a:link,
a:visited {
color: #86bd21;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: bold;
 }

The code within the “{…}” will be applied to the link styles. This is where colors, font styles, background colors and more as specified for the specific element.

For this example I want my link styles to be red instead of the green which was previously specified. I like the underline and the bold so I’m going to leave those alone.

a:link,
a:visited {
color: #ff0000;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: bold;
}

For those who missed it or would like a copy of the slides, here is a PDF of our presentation on Drupal themes that we recently did at the Berkeley Drupal User Group.  The stage of "I know I need a Drupal theme but I’m not sure what to do next" is an easy place to get lost when you’re new to Drupal!  We had a great Q&A session afterwards, with about 35 people in attendance. 

It’s nothing fancy, but we covered the basics of:

• What does a theme do?
• How can I get a Drupal theme?
• How do I get a Drupal site design or hire a themer?
• How can I evaluate the quality and features of a theme?

Download the PDF of the presentation

Coming up…

Stop by the meeting at the end of August to learn more about the Patterns module and see a breakdown of how a community networking site was created, presented by Gravitek Labs.

Now that Views and CCK have hit release candidate (read: stable, almost ready for primetime) versions for Drupal 6, we should start seeing a significant crossover from new sites being built in Drupal 6 instead of Drupal 5.  If you’re new to Drupal, or simply exploring Drupal 6 for the first time, here are a few screencasts to get you up to speed on the new versions of the most important modules for Drupal.

Views 2

Introduction to Views 2 in Drupal 6
A 10-minute video that will give you an excellent introduction to using the new version of Views.  This video is a bit older and some of the interface is different compared to the current release.  However, if you want a quick overview, this is the video for you. 

New Features in Views 2
At over half an hour, this screencast goes into much more detail about Views, and if you want a more extensive tutorial with narration, give this one a watch.  It doesn’t cover all the new features, but Greg’s done a great job of showing off what Views can do!

Also, make sure you install the Advanced Help module to get quick links to help topics while building your views.