This three-day training covers the inner-workings of Drupal Commerce, developing with Commerce, and leveraging key Drupal 7 functionalities for Commerce integration.
Pre-requisite: This training is best suited for Drupal developers and programmers who currently work full time with Drupal either in a company environment or as freelance contractors. Experience using and developing for Rules and Views will ensure you get the most out of the training. Required materials: Laptop w/ wifi; USB key if you want to keep a copy of your demo site code
Key topics include :
Drupal Commerce architecture
We review the basic core modules of Commerce, and review the architecture of the Commerce system. This includes several new Drupal 7 Entities, the powerful and flexible Price field, and how they work together. We also touch on which elements can stand alone - building commerce sites without Carts, or without Payment, for example.
Separation of product data and display methods
A product can be an physical item for sale, a service, or even a donation without a pre-defined price. For this reason, Drupal Commerce treats products as a flexible back-end entity separate from nodes. In the training we demonstrate how this separation allows web developers a wide flexibility in merchandising and managing their product display. It also centralizes product data independent of how the product was purchased (especially important for multilingual / multi-domain sites).
Introduction to the new Commerce Kickstart V2 Distribution
With our brand-new Kickstart distribution, we'll start with an empty Drupal Commerce site with no configuration, and build a finished store based on the Kickstart theme. Time will be spent looking under the hood and learn how the Kickstart V2 sample boutique is built. We'll discover how to use all the core and contributed Commerce modules to improve everything from theming - like product image zoom - to back end - like the new product variation manager.
Tight integration with Drupal 7
Drupal Commerce now completely integrates Views for the Cart, Product and Orders list - which means all of these elements are completely customizable in a way very familiar to Drupal developers. Commerce also make extensive use of Rules, which allows web developers and online boutiques a vast array of possibility to fine tune their business rules - from simple discounts to complex purchase workflows. The training introduces developers to Rules, and then quickly demonstrates how extensively it is integrated into Commerce, and how much further you can go.
Cart and Checkout
The Cart and Checkout system is very flexible and fully pluggable. Web developers use Views to customize the Cart, and can create new pages and page elements for the Checkout process - all via existing modules and without needing to write code.
Taxes
Taxes are a complicated subject - often you have nation and regional taxes, and some countries have taxes per type of product, or even multiple taxes. During the Commerce training we demonstrate how to handle these kinds of situations, including US Federal and State taxes, European VAT, and how to display taxes conditionally.
Discounts and Coupons
Commerce uses the Rules engine to manage discounts and coupons, and can handle a wide variety of discounts, from global to targeted discounts based on product attributes, users, their roles or even location, and even dates. Participants will learn how to implements various forms of dicsounts, as well as learning the variety of solutions for displaying discounts, savings, etc. We will also review the coupon framework that works with contributed modules.
Payment System
Commerce uses a centralized payment system which manages transaction history and the integration of payment methods with the order system. We review best practices for on-site and off-site payment methods including how to integrate 2-step Authorize and Capture methods. Developers will also learn the importance of integrating Rules into the payment methods for optimal flexibility.
Review Contributed Modules
The core of commerce is very flexible but ultimately fairly lightweight. The Drupal Commerce community has been hard at work adding dozens of modules to support this core functionality. Over the course of the training we will review several simple helper modules that can do everything from adding options and flexibility in data display to modifying the checkout process and even simplifying the product creation process. We demonstrate how to use Shipping and Addressbook, and also how to integrate Search API to create a powerful product merchandising system.
