I need to borrow some wisdom from a Drupal expert.
We are hiring a marketing firm to build our website. They are building the front end using Drupal 7, and hiring yet another firm to do the programming. Once the front is complete, they will be handing it to me to implement the shopping cart and eCommerce, along with integrating into our CRM and ERP
From what little I've worked with Drupal, I know that it generally manages everything as a chunk of content. I am also aware that you can create a custom content type which we could build to make a product model. And I have read in a few places that Ubercart can use this to build the product catalog essentially.
So, if I allow them to continue in this way, will there be a way for me to pull or update information about products through an API (SOAP or otherwise)? Is there a better alternative?
My concern is that handling products as content seems a bit flimsy, and I fear that when it comes time to link together our CRM and ERP, that I won't have any way (short of working with the database directly), to update or pull information. Ultimately, the goal is to have Drupal only deal with layout and actual content, and our ERP/CRM duo will handle maintaining product information. Is there an established method or best practice for what we are looking to do?
++ I'm more interested in the database structure than anything else.
I think it depends on what type of products are you going to sell, are you going to sell them online and regarding to this realize which software will be primary(master) and which one will be secondary(slave).
If you plan just to tell people you have several products you can store these products inside ERP and then export ERP/CRM products data and import them into Drupal on a daily basis. ERP/CRM will be your master storage then.
If you plan to sell something online and you have to manage stock levels then you can follow one of these solutions (or make up another one):
ERP/CRM is a master storage for everything (products, clients, stock levels). Drupal is used only for authentication process and for your products storage "gateway" so your site visitors will browse through your site and that browsing won't affect your ERP/CRM but if one will buy something you will let Drupal get all information abuot logged customer and let him boy something regarding to your stock levels.
Drupal is a master storage for everything. I think this is not a good idea because you already have ERP/CRM, products, descriptions and so on so you will need to make them synchronized and that's always lots of hard work.
ERP+CRM are for products and clients offline, Drupal is for e-commerce only. You just need to export your products from your ERP system and import them into your Drupal site on a daily basis. Then if someone will want to buy something online he will interact with Drupal site (cart, checkout etc).
Technically importing/exporting nodes is not as difficult as it could be. For instance you just create a stdClass() object, fill its values ($node->title, $node->body, etc) then call node_prepare(), node_save() and that's all.
If you could provide more information about your business and what are you going to do with your Drupal site, maybe, you will get more answers. Also sorry for my English, I'm not native.
Related
I am looking for a theme for forex trading website. Where customer can sign up for paid membership and receive reports daily.
I want a theme which can deal with basic front end design (Company information based home page, about us, contact, blog) and users can signup and login there account. While at back end I can manage accounts and update reports daily.
What you're asking for can be accomplished many different ways, so you'll need to explore what works best for you and your particular skill set. Here's my take in things though.
I would likely go about this with WooCommerce and their StoreFront theme. Storefront is very generic looking out the the box which makes it very customizable. It doesn't have to look like a site that sells t-shirts.
WooCommerce is free and very actively supported. They also off an extension for paid memberships, which it sounds like you'd be interested in.
I hope this info helps give you some direction.
I need a WordPress plugin that can do comparison of different services, like the one on http://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/
This is something that you will most likely have to program yourself. Mainly because there wont be many plugins that will go out to service provider websties, scrap the data, then aggregate it properly to compare on the field related to you.
In the sense of programming this you would want to do the following steps.
Determine what service providers you want to scrape
Scrape said providers for their prices (do it on a throttled basis or you will most likely get blocked by the providers website).
Aggregate the data and store it in a data store
Display the provider services while showing your comparison.
If you do not want to program this plugin yourself you can do a hybrid approach which requires a lot of manual intervention.
This site shows many "compare products" plugins that will allow you to compare 2 products in an ecommerce setting. If you use one of these plugins along with a wordpress ecommerce plugin you could manually enter each service provider as a "product" then display the product comparison.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/compare-products
I´m currently developing the Intranet for the company I am working for. The site is currently based on SharePoint, but I have to migrate it to Wordpress. And that´s my first developer experience with Wordpress, you just should know. Creating the theme, content and working with the WP Admin area works very well, but where I´m feeling defenseless is the permissions topic.
Generally, the whole page content is managed by the Marketing department. So, for me it is ok that they have access to WP Admin and I would use one of the predefined roles available.
But there will be also an area for the departments where specified users per department should be able to
edit the pre created page content
add subpages and edit its content (it would be nice if it can be defined which page templates can be selected by the user)
add posts for a pre created category (that should not be changeable by the user)
edit its profile and password
A whole access to WP Admin should be therefore prevented.
I read much information about roles, capabilities and reviewed forums and blogs presenting potential plugins. But to be honest, I´ve lost the overview and I´m totally scared about what´s the right way to do such like this the professional way.
Is there anybody who was already in such a situation or knows a good resource where to read more?
Thanks a lot.
John
PressPermit is the tool I choosed. It covers all needs described in my question.
Note: To use all features, you need to buy a support subscription currently available for $55 a year for one site.
However, a very powerful tool and in comparison to Advanced Access Manager I tried before, it really supports permissions also for multiple roles.
If you are thinking about, use the screencasts to see if the tool cover your needs. Unfortunately, there is no trial available, but you can request an evolution wordpress installation which was setup within one day in my case. This service costs $5.
I need a little bit help with user management.
I have an education site (not ready yet), i need two registration:
First for students, they can register to courses with name, email, phone number etc.
Second for teachers, who can register with name, email, year of birth etc., but teachers can register for courses too.
But when a teacher wants to register for courses too, i want that she/he can use same email address, name etc. too. And i want it, after a teacher register both place, on the wp-admin/users i see just one registration.
There is any plugin which is easy to do it?
Thanks for your help!
The answer is 'no' there is no easy plugin for this. I'm DV the question though.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you not use Wordpress for this website and you consider building everything yourself. You are already hitting the constraints of Wordpress in that it is difficult to assign multiple roles and manage them consistently. I'm going to take another guess and say that even if you launch using Wordpress, you'll quickly outgrow it and need to rewrite your entire application.
If you build the application yourself, you can design the user database however you want and allow users to have one or more roles (i.e. student and/or teacher). Then your application can use the roles a user has to determine what to display to them.
If you want to reduce your overall dev time, piece together third-party APIs and tools. If you are using Node.js, check out Keystone.js (http://keystonejs.com), Hatch (http://hatchjs.com), and other CMS tools. You can also look for a user database like Passport (https://www.inversoft.com/products/user-database-sso) that give you a bunch of user management features. There are tons of free or open-source tools out there that can help you build this application quickly.
There are any number of membership plugins for Wordpress that exist to monetize website content. People pay a subscription and have access to pages and posts. This makes it difficult to locate what I am looking for.
Is there a plugin that is specifically for managing the membership in an organization?
WHAT IT SHOULD DO
Have the ability to import existing
membership details and create WP
users from those details.
Automate and manage the
collection of annual dues.
Facilitate mass e-mails to members.
Restrict access to some of the Web site pages
perhaps by linking membership to WP
roles.
Perhaps manage payments for conferences.
Have the ability to export membership details.
SOME THINGS IT SHOULD NOT DO
Have pay per post functionality.
Sell value added pages.
Have different levels of accounts based on content.
TIA
I was looking for a similar plugin for a non-profit organization client of mine, and finally found MemberMouse. I was particularly concerned about being able to setup annual dues at a certain time of the year with pro-rating for new members during the rest of the year. While this is not in their base plugin, they can custom program that for a small fee.
The only parts of your request that plugin may not cover is facilitating mass emails (you could manage that through something like Constant Contact) and taking payments for conferences (which you could setup on your site anyway pretty easily using PayPal or your merchant account provider and a cart).
Hope this helps. I would suggest contacting MemberMouse with your questions to see if it will work for you.