It’s easy to imagine that different kinds of stores might have certain things they want to have happen when various events take place throughout the purchasing process. For example, if someone adds more than 10 of an item to his cart, a store might want to provide a 10% discount. Or if someone was anonymous and then registers or logs in, a store might want to assign his old shopping cart to his newly found account. Traditionally, this kind of custom logic would have to be done in code by a programmer. However, the Rules module exposes a user interface for clicking together custom logic in a web-based interface. This increases accessibility to non-programmers, and also allows for bits of business logic to be shared among multiple sites with the Rules module’s import and export capabilities. In this lesson we'll review the main architectural blocks of the Rules module, covering events, conditions, actions, variables, and data selectors.
Additional resources
In this lesson we'll try a practical example of some Rules module concepts for the Sweet Tees store. Drupal Commerce’s Tax module stores its tax charging in Rules. Before we can open up our store to the public, we need to ensure that all applicable sales taxes are being applied to our items. Because Sweet Tees is based in California, we will need to charge 7.25% sales tax on all products sold if the customer lives in the state of California. This means we need to set up a conditional tax rate to only apply to California.
Additional resources
In this series, Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal, we'll take an old Drupal theme based on a 960 pixel grid, and convert it, step by step, using just good ole CSS and HTML, to be more fluid, more flexible, more responsive than ever.
Our case study is the Anytown Farmers Markets. Anytown Farmers Markets has an existing web site that uses a theme based on a 960 pixel grid. It works great on larger screens, pretty well on iPads, but on an iPhone, the text is really small and you have to pinch and zoom and horizontally scroll to get around the screen.
Our goal will be to transition the site from a fixed width two column desktop site to a fluid and flexible site whose layout, images, and type gracefully transform at practically any size screen to provide a user-friendly experience where our site's content can be enjoyed by users browsing with a more diverse set of devices.
Throughout this series, you'll learn how to use, configure, and customize the style of a Drupal contributed module that provides a responsive, mobile-friendly main menu. We'll tackle images, tables, and slideshows and explore some select solutions for making these traditionally rigid elements flex with a fluid container. In the process of converting this theme to be responsive, you'll learn to tackle some real-world, sometimes messy and often times not-so-clear-cut problems and potential solutions.
To take advantage of this series, you'll want to be comfortable with HTML and CSS and the basics of setting up a theme in Drupal 7. You don't need to know Sass or any advanced theming. This series will help you understand common problems encountered in responsive web design and how to solve them in the context of a Drupal 7 theme.
Additional resources
In the process of transitioning their site to be more mobile friendly, The Anytown Farmers Market web team needs to take a closer look at what content they currently have on their site and how they may want to prioritize and deliver that content differently, given the broader audience base they are now targeting.
As we adapt content and navigation regions to stack, we need to decide on a priority system for each page template. We'll take the home page as an example and discuss how each component and region should be prioritized when the content is stacked into one column.
Additional resources
Of course, it’s one thing to have a bunch of products ready for purchase, but what Sweet Tees really cares about is accepting money for those products. They want to be able to accept credit card transactions on their online store. There's more than what's on your Drupal site involved in this though. In this lesson, we'll discuss merchant accounts and payment gateways—what they are and why you need them, along with providing payment security.
Additional resources
PayPal is a popular payment processor, especially for new site owners. It allows credit card transactions as well as payments from within PayPal itself. There are predominantly two “flavors” of PayPal’s payment processing tools: Website Payments Standard (WPS) and Website Payments Pro (WPP). For our purposes, we’ll be using Website Payments Standard, since there are no setup fees, no extra security setup required, and we can get started right away. In this lesson we'll create test PayPal buyer and seller accounts, set up access to the test sandbox, and make sure it is working properly.
Additional resources
Now that we have the PayPal side of payments set up, it’s time to set up the Drupal side of things. We’ll do this with the Commerce PayPal module, which is an extension of the main Drupal Commerce package. Just as we saw with Taxes, Commerce payment methods are Rules-enabled for maximum flexibility. In this lesson we'll walk through enabling the PayPal WPS payment method and configuring our PayPal sandbox access so that we can start taking test transactions on our store.
Additional resources
Using Drupal, 2nd edition
Using Drupal source code
Commerce PayPal project
The remaining element of our site is actually implementing the e-commerce portions: an online shopping cart and the ability to process orders, as well as reporting tools to tell us how our store is doing. We will now complete our store configuration by adding a shopping cart, configuring the checkout process, and placing a test order to make sure the whole store is actually working.
Additional resources
In this series, we have covered the basics of setting up an online storefront and shopping cart using the Drupal Commerce package for Drupal. However, there are several additional modules that you will likely want to consider before taking your online store live. We'll take a brief tour of:
Additional resources
In this series, we were able to set up a complete online store for our customer, Sweet Tees, using Drupal Commerce, a powerful, flexible e-commerce framework built on Drupal. We set up a payment system through PayPal’s Website Payments Standard. We also delved into the topic of data imports with the Feeds module, and covered tweaking Drupal’s functionality at various system points with the Rules module. In this lesson we'll tour the Sweet Tees site, discussing our implementation points, and reviewing the modules and resources we used.
Additional resources
Using Drupal, 2nd edition
Using Drupal source code
Up next: Using Drupal Appendix A: Installing and Upgrading Drupal
The original 960 Robots theme is based on a 960 pixel grid. It has container and grid classes with widths declared in pixels—an absolute metric. In this lesson, we will take a first step in implementing a responsive design: converting absolute units to relative ones. We'll begin this process by editing the 960.css file, which contains the width declarations for our container and grid classes that make up our site's layout. Using the target ÷ context = result formula, we'll convert widths declared in pixels first to ems, then to percentages, with a little nudge of the decimal point over two places.
With our layout's container and grid classes using relative widths declared in percentages, we'll be on well on our way to making our site more fluid and flexible.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (Checkout branch 03-fluid-layout)
We're making progress in making our theme more flexible and fluid. Next, we’ll address our site's typography and implement relative font-sizing. This will help ensure that our text is more legible without the need to pinch and zoom. To do this, we’ll convert our font-sizes declared in pixels to ems, using the target ÷ context = result formula. Break out those calculators!
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (Checkout branch 04-responsive-typography)
As we've been converting our font-sizes to ems, we've noticed other properties that need updating, including margin and padding. In order to correctly apply our target ÷ context = result formula, we need to know the appropriate value for "context." Converting padding presents us with a new context, different than that of a margin. In this lesson, we'll learn how to determine the appropriate context and convert padding and margin pixels to relative units.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (Checkout branch 05-responsive-padding-margins)
So far, we've adapted our layout to be flexible and fluid using relative units like percentages and ems, instead of absolute ones, like pixels. The problem is that smaller devices will often use resolutions much greater than the actual size of the screen size or viewport. So while our relative sizing is technically working, it's not going to be terribly useful or make our content more readable and accessible until we add an important tag to the head of our html template file: the viewport meta tag.
By adding the viewport meta tag to the head of our html template file, we're letting the browser know that we want the viewport size to be the size of the device, not some huge resolution more suitable for a 17" monitor, for example. This is a small but critical step in implementing a responsive design. Without it, our hard work of converting to relative units just isn't going to pay off.
In this lesson, you'll learn how to add a viewport meta tag to the head of all html pages using a special Drupal template file that we'll create. Then we'll step back and admire the results using our mobile emulation tools.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (Checkout branch 06-viewport-meta)
Written tutorial based on this video
While it's not forbidden to use absolute positioning in responsive designs, the way that absolute positioning was utilized in the original theme is less than ideal as we work on moving theme toward flexibility, fluidity, and responsiveness.
In this lesson, we'll focus on putting elements in the header back into the natural flow of the document. We'll refactor some HTML and CSS, removing absolute positioning declarations and change the source order of some elements in our page template file.
Restoring the natural order and flow of the document will make things easier for us down the road as we adapt our components to stack into one-column in small screens.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (checkout branch 07-08-flow-media-queries)
In this series, we’ll start out by adapting the Anytown Farmers Market website layout for display on a small mobile screen. The current layout is a stacked 2-column layout with a full-width header, primary content column, and two sidebars. We'll simplify and update the wide layout to use just one main content column plus a right sidebar that will stack under the content region on smaller viewports. We'll use the breakpoints that we identified in the previous lesson to implement width-based media queries and trigger the appropriate layout — stacked for narrow screens and 2-column for wider viewports.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (checkout branch 07-08-flow-media-queries)
Responsive Menus module enables a site builder to install and configure a responsive menu with very little CSS required. We'll walk through the configuration of the module using the media query we built in the previous lesson. We'll also add some CSS to hide our desktop navigation when the mobile menu is shown.
Additional resources
Responsive Menus module (Drupal.org)
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (checkout branch 09-responsive-menu-contrib-module)
There are quite a few images on the site that aren’t scaling very well. They’re either way too small or way too big and break the layout. For now, we just want ensure that our images don’t overflow beyond the layout container and that they are viewable at a comfortable size across all viewport sizes. While we're at it, we can make sure all HTML media objects stay safely contained in a flexible container, especially when sizing down.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (checkout branch 10-max-width)
Our image gallery plugin has long been known to be barely navigable on a small screen. Let’s fix our images and replace our photo gallery plugin with a responsive image slider that will work on small to large screens. We'll swap out Views Slideshow in favor of FlexSlider in this lesson.
Additional resources
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/demo-rwd-7x (checkout branch 11-flexslider)
In this tutorial, you will learn how to get a Drupalize.Me tutorial demo site up and running using Pantheon. You'll learn about the various components that make up the Drupalize.Me demo site downloads and how each part should be imported. By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to create a Drupalize.Me demo site on a free Pantheon Dev instance so that you can follow along with the trainer in the Drupalize.Me video tutorial.