Submitted by patrick on Sat, 05/22/2010 - 16:57
Posted in
| Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author | George Papadongonas, Yiannis Doxaras |  |
| Publisher | Packt Publishing / Birmingham | |
| First published | March 2010 | |
| Pages | 364 | |
| ISBN | 978-1-847199-20-1 | |
| List price | €34.99 (Ordering / Product information) | |
The web has leveraged postal shopping. Webshops have established themselves as a cost efficient alternative to printing and mailing catalogs to customers. With Drupal and Ubercart, online stores can nowadays be operated at a fraction of the cost and size of the original mail-order outlets, allowing even small companies to enter the market.
Structure and Content
Chapter 1: Getting Started – This chapter provides some basic definitions on Drupal and Ubercart. In addition it sets the context of the online store case study that will be developed throughout the book.
Chapter 2: Installation of Drupal and Ubercart – This chapter is a quick installation reference for Drupal, the required Drupal modules, and Ubercart.
Chapter 3: Basic Configuration – This chapter helps you to understand the basic Drupal and Ubercart configuration.
Chapter 4: Managing Categories, Products, and Attributes – In this chapter the action begins! You will learn how to manage categories using the Drupal taxonomy, how to create new products or import them from external files, and how to use the attribute system of Ubercart.
Chapter 5: Managing Shipping, Taxes, and Payments – Ubercart helps the user to manage shipping, taxes, and payments in a flexible way. In this chapter you'll to learn how to configure them.
Chapter 6: Managing Customers and Orders – This chapter is focused on CRM, reporting, and after-sales support.
Chapter 7: Customizing the Frontend – The default theme of Drupal works fine, but it's rather boring. In this chapter you will learn how to install a new theme, customize a theme, or create a new theme from scratch.
Chapter 8: User Interface Enhancement Techniques – The scope of this chapter is to help you to implement more complex marketing techniques.
Chapter 9: Optimizing Your Store – Store optimization is a sometimes forgotten, but necessary process. In this chapter you will learn how make an Ubercart store faster, more secure, and more search engine friendly.
Appendix A: Hotel Bookings
Appendix B: Modules used in the book
Appendix C: Free and commercial Ubercart Themes
Conclusion
Sadly, "Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x" has a number of severe shortcomings:
- The authors fail to define their target audience. The opening chapters are clearly written with aspiring shopowners in mind that have neither experience with webhosting nor Drupal. The closing chapters on the other hand require extensive knowledge without being extensive themselves. Especially chapter 7, "theming", stands out negatively here. The topic is most certainly nothing a beginner could handle and would justify a book on it's own.
- "Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x" is essentially a "cookalong" tour guide to configuring Drupal/Ubercart. Most of the explanations are given in terms of screenshots, where the reader is suppose to copy the settings. This is annoying for two reasons:
- The reader is not presented with "the big picture" and may get easily lost.
- It suggests that there is only one way to setup a shop with Ubercart in which case one would have to ask why the module requires configuration at all (and to that extend, why there is a whole book about it).
- There are plenty of screenshots, showing configuration dialogs, but nearly no diagrams, explaining concepts. Especially workflows are poorly described and if so, only as implications of shop configurations.
All in all, "Drupal e-commerce with Ubercart 2.x" is a rather disappointing book as it tries to suit everybody and naturally fails in doing so. Webshops are a complex line of business. There is more to running one than just setting it up according to an instructions manual.