Commerce Guys has delivered Drupal power e-commerce training at the last three DrupalCons, and we're delighted to have the chance to present the training again at DrupalCon London on August 22, 2011. We continually revise our curriculum based on attendee feedback, and we keep it updated to reflect the latest hotness in the Drupal Commerce modules. This time around, there's plenty of new material to share with regard to the Add to Cart form and customizable products.
Our training starts with the basics, discussing the core architecture of the Product, Shopping Cart / Order, and Payment systems. We discuss each topic in turn and give time to allow attendees to work through a complete Drupal Commerce site build with our trainers. We introduce every feature in the core modules and provide a basic introduction to Rules to get attendees started with adding discounts, conditional taxes, and automated order workflow rules. We leave time open to discuss site building and contributed module strategy at the close of the day.
Attendees do not need prior Drupal e-commerce experience to get the most out of this training, but it will be helpful for you to have an intermediate skill in site building. We'll be dancing around from Drupal 7's new Field UI to the Views UI and through the Rules UI, each one being very information dense and not for the uninitiated.
With this latest training we're eager to introduce various new features added to Drupal Commerce in the final days of its beta cycle. For some time, the appearance of product attribute fields on the Add to Cart form has been governed by what I called magic configuration. The problem with magic is that even if you see it working and know how it's supposed to work, you may not be able to reproduce it. This was the case for many users of the modules, so we've replaced the magic (sad, I know) with dependable configuration settings (ok, not so sad).
By altering forms in the Field UI, we now embed the following options to help you create complex Add to Cart forms selling products with multiple variations or points of customization:
When you add a product reference field to an entity, you have the option of injecting fields from the referenced products into the display of the referencing entity. Commerce Kickstart creates a Product display node type using a product reference field with this option enabled so prices, images, and other fields attached to your products can be displayed in the node.
By adding fields to your product types, you can create a group of products representing variations of the same base product (e.g. different sizes of the same style and design of a shirt). There's a simple checkbox to start using field data on the Add to Cart form along with an optional widget choice.
By adding fields to your line item types, you can expose customization options to the customer on the Add to Cart form. If you have multiple types of customizable products, you can create additional product line item types and use them on different Add to Cart forms.
Come to our training in London to figure out how to make the best use of these features and more!