I would like to know if it is possible to integrate zen cart to Drupal 7+ ?
I know that there was a Drupal zen cart integration project http://drupal.org/project/zencart
but it seems only support in Drupal 5.x
thx!
I'm afraid it's very unlikely, efforts for e-commerce in Drupal 7 have been very firmly moved into the Commerce module which is still a wee bit unstable and without a full complement of add-ons as yet.
There's also the Ubercart module which as it happens I'm grappling with myself at the moment. It's fairly complete but be prepared to get stuck in and do some coding if you want it to do anything that's not 'out-of-the-box'.
Drupal is great as long as it is not fully ecommerce. If the site has content plus little bit of selling, then drupal is OK. If you are serious about online shopping for your site, then magneto or a paid software might be a solution.
Magneto is not totally free, the free one is not easy and it is slow.
I have experienced zencart and it is OK if you are going to use it as the main cart integrated with forum or content management systems, the integration is not always easy. zencart is badly designed for a framework point of view, examples, inserting inline css in the template doesn't allow flexibility in overriding especially if the markup output is the result of a module.
I would generally prefer to use drupal for CMS/social network, zencart for online shop, phpbb for forums.
I chose zencart because I am an experienced web developer and I can work around badly designed table-based module output. The main templates are easy to edit. check http://domainpiranha.com/customizezencart.
It is the case in all CMS framework that you have to deal with them the way they are. If you are willing to extensively customize, then programming your own software might be easier.
Related
I’m looking for some advice when it comes to custom CMS development.
Wordpress has been perfect for me before a became a developer. I used to use page builders like Elementor & WPBakery.
When developing within WP, would I need to develop a page-builder for people (without coding knowledge) to edit their pages? I’m aware of Gutenberg, is that able to edit coded pages or would it not be able to read anything as it wasn’t built using Gutenberg?
If so, would it not be better to develop a Custom CMS similar to Wordpress? That way you are able to offer a blank canvas CMS that you can brand as your own?
Thanks in advance.
Interesting question! It will require some prior research on your part, as there is no obvious answer. Below are my thoughts on the matter, but it the decision is yours to make, as the project requirements are unique and also the time you can invest in it.
When developing within WP, would I need to develop a page-builder for people (without coding knowledge) to edit their pages?
A: No. Gutenberg is perfect for this.
I’m aware of Gutenberg, is that able to edit coded pages or would it not be able to read anything as it wasn’t built using Gutenberg?
A: It won't read anything that wasn't made with it, but you can try recreating those pages with it. Depends on the design, but it shouldn't be hard. If it is a site for a client, you can ask them to recreate one or two pages and see how they feel. They will answer this question for you :)
That way you are able to offer a blank canvas CMS that you can brand as your own?
A: You can "rebrand" the WordPress admin with such a plugin
If so, would it not be better to develop a Custom CMS similar to Wordpress?
A: It all depends on how comfortable you feel with WordPress and Gutenberg, code-wise. You can do pretty much anything, if you understand the PHP, React (Gutenberg is written in React) and logic behind WP, so you won't need a custom CMS. Again, it all depends on your skills with the technologies. If you rate yourself a 10/10, no need to think about it, but I guess you wouldn't be asking this question, if you were.
Pros of going with WordPress and Gutenberg:
You already have all the necessary tools.
A ton of supporting plugins, already developed by other people.
WordPress has one of the most well-maintained codebases out there, so you will have a great start, compared to building a CMS on your own. Even if you decide to create your own plugin, you have a set of rules and practices that you need to adhere to, which is great for starters. You also have all the necessary components - DB, back-end and front-end ready.
Gutenberg is pretty stable right now and you can install the plugin, because the code that is implemented in WP core is not the latest. It is great for building pages, when you don't know code. Look into all the different blocks it offers by default and think if they cover your requirements. There are also a lot of extra blocks you can add.
The popularity of Gutenberg is growing and the community is slowly, but surely moving in that direction, so making this project with Gutenberg would benefit your future career as a WP developer, if you are interested in building one.
On the point of growing community, you will find answers to a lot of the common issues.
Pros of building your own CMS:
You will see the whole process - DB design, connection and expanding. Back-end and front-end development, user authentication and administration. For me this is a con, because there are many unexpected problems, which WP has solved. It is also very time-consuming, so if you have limited time for this project, I would advise against this.
You can make a slim CMS, which covers only your requirements and you will know the ins and outs of the code, so any future changes and expansions will be easier for you to make.
As you said, it will be easier to brand as your own and you can build the Admin side of it however you want, even though there are defined UX standards, which won't allow you to go very wild. It will probably resemble the WP admin in one way or another. Check out these admin page designs, for reference.
Conclusion
Personally, I would go for WordPress and Gutenberg, because I have had mostly bad experiences with building everything on my own. I am not a good enough coder and that is OK, because I can use all of these tools, built by awesome developers before me. So please keep in mind that building your own CMS will take a lot of time, if you want to make it stable and secure. There are also alternatives to WordPress.
If a e-com website is running on Drupal + Ubercart does it makes sense to migrate it to a e-com suited platform like Opencart or Magento ?
Making e-com related changes to Ubercart are very combursome .. things like a customized checkout or a backend management is quite difficult..
Can any one with experience in both Drupal + Ubercart to a platform like OpenCart or Magento help ?
All ecommerce requires a backend of some sort.
The latest Drupal Commerce Kickstart 2.0 is aiming to be very easy to use - more so that drupal itself. and it has some really nice features.
http://drupal.org/project/commerce_kickstart
I would suggest you wait a week or two before using in earnest - they are improving on it very quickly in time for a big event next week.
If Ubercart is difficult for you, then Magento will be far more difficult.
Magento is booming in eCommerce market but it requires lots of resources and very good skill to make/customize things. If you are ready for big challenges, you should migrate your site to Magento. Considering future of Magento, it's very safe.
I would definitely move away from Drupal eCommerce it is not built entirely for eCommerce and never will be. Both Magento and Opencart would be better options because both communities around them are entirely focused on eCommerce. Magento is much better if you can find a good magento developer to customize it for you but Opencart is easier to use.
If you are serious about your eCommerce site than Magento is the best solution available but will come at a higher up front cost than Opencart. However if you need a lot of advanced customization than it will actually be easier and cheaper to build in Magento down the road because advanced customization can become more difficult in Opencart because it is not built for enterprise level customization, whereas Magento is. Magento may become easier to do things like selling at different prices to different customers (wholesale) so it really depends on the features you will need in the future.
I would say that it makes sense to migrate from drupal to Opencart. Drupal is a CMS offering some plugins for eCommerce (and each have certain drawbacks or bugs that need to be fixed) Opencart is a platform developed for ecommerce purposes.
If compared to Magento, Opencart is also open source, functional, with large community, supports multiple languages and currencies, and what's more - allows multistore management as Magento.
On the other side - Opencart is lightweight, easier in administration, has more available documentation, and doesn't require much modifications, so you can literally start immediately.
There are tons of Drupal tutorials out there - theming, modules, database interaction, taxonomy, etc. etc. Most that I find are extremely in-depth, but none give a big-picture, site-level overview.
Are there any good tutorials (videos and/or text-based) that show the creation of a simple website, with a simple administrative section? Not ridiculous reams of configuration, or complex, arcane modules...just a simple website with basic pages (i.e. about us, people, news, etc.) that are admin-configurable, and that doesn't look like the default Drupal install.
Obviously to be an effective Drupal dev, I would need to learn these ins and outs, and I certainly plan to. What I need right now though is enough of an overview to give a presentation on Drupal in several days to non-technical people on how we can use Drupal to architect their website. I've already purchased Pro Drupal 7 Development, and have perused the Drupal API docs and tutorials on their website, but these are all too micro - where's the macro?
Thanks.
Maybe the book Using Drupal is a good start for you. It's less about "How does this dark corner of the API work?" but more about tasks you need to accomplish when building a certain type of site (a blog, a wiki, an online store...).
To get you started....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRW7FALA88
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT_TZEQEm5c
Creating a Content Type
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElXXz9-bxJc
I have never used DotNetNuke before. I'm thinking about giving it a try to help me build websites, and I'd like to hear from other developers who are in a position to compare DotNetNuke with other CMS's/Web Application Frameworks.
I have used both DNN and Drupal to build fairly large, content-based sites. My focus is more on the production side... UI/themeing, module configuration, etc. I'm sold on Drupal, but there may be other choices that meet your needs just as well. I just happened to work with both systems in recent months.
Drupal's core taxonomy module gives you the benefit of creating a relationship between different kinds of content. If you have "article" and "video" content types, you can easily display data from both types based on the shared taxonomy terms. This is huge and something DNN lacks.
Drupal's hook system is also a big benefit when building your own modules or creating "sub-modules" to alter or add to the default functionality of an existing module. This allows you to customize functionality or take advantage of another module's functionality as your application runs. If you purchase a module for DNN, you will have to alter the module if it doesn't meet your needs. Once you do this, you will need to update it each time there's a new release that you would like to take advantage of. DNN modules seem to be more stand-alone solutions. For example, if a DNN module has a rating system, it's only a part of that solution. With Drupal, I can use the "5 Star" rating module in my forums, my blogs, my articles, my videos, etc. There's central configuration for it and I only theme it once.
The themeing layer in Drupal also gives you a large amount of flexibility in that process. My frustration with themeing DNN sites was that I was stuck working with the markup the developer used, with no option for altering the output without hacking the module. With theme hooks and function overrides, I can change the output from those modules to meet my needs (not completely sometimes, but enough), without touching the module code itself.
The biggest problem I had with DNN modules, including some of the most popular, was just a lack of documentation or discussions available for how to achieve your goal. While Drupal's forums can be hard to navigate and you might not always find the answer you are looking for, there are many outlets for gathering information. Honestly, using DNN made me appreciate the community approach of Drupal more.
I was left feeling that DNN would be fine for building sites with more basic needs. But for that, I would still choose something like WordPress or Joomla, considering they have much larger user bases and, in my opinion, are more sophisticated.
Hope this helps you some.
DNN is a pretty good .NET solution for CMS. If you want more flexibility, I would look at SiteFinity for .NET CMS systems. This is a very flexible and elegant CMS for .NET
If you venture out of .NET and want to look at PHP solutions, then DRUPAL, JOOMLA, and WORDPRESS are best solutions. Some comments about each:
WORDPRESS - Is the simplest and most elegant CMS to work with. Originally a blogging software, it has a super-easy user interface, although that also reads as more limited power and features. It's excellent for content driven websites and templates are easily built.
DRUPAL - Is very flexible and configurable, but I find it more complicated than the others. The Admin interface requires more programming knowledge to pull off and adding components and extras is a little more complicated. But, DRUPAL has been proven in the business and government world as a secure and reliable CMS.
JOOMLA - Is my personal favorite. It is also very powerful and I prefer the Admin. interface. Joomla allows for much flexibility and has the most user created modules and plug-ins out there. You have to invent near nothing with this one. I am biased in favor of Joomla, because I use it the most. That said, it has limiting factors against DRUPAL, such as user security features. But this is being fixed in the next upgrade.
Hope that helps as well.
I have development experience using both DNN and Drupal to build content-rich websites. My preference is Drupal for a number of reasons:
Development time-line was shorter; I was able to produce more in less time.
Drupal has a larger and more active developer community. More resources are available to aid in development.
DNN is not actually a CMS. It is only a framework; Drupal is a framework with a foundational CMS.
Drupal is easier to install.
DNN modules cost money; Drupal modules are free.
Actually, I put together some notes a while back when trying to understand the architectural differences between DNN and Drupal. Found those notes, they are here: DNN versus Drupal. Hope this is helpful.
I experienced a fairly high degree of frustration when working with DNN and I don't believe I am alone in that regard. About a year ago, ASPdotnetStoreFront abandoned their involvement with DNN calling it a "disaster to work with".
I am curious to know what piqued your interest in DNN and if you have a specific website project in mind. Regardless, I wish you success and I hope this helps.
I worked in a .NET development shop utilizing Kentico CMS. I agree, it is feature rich and stable. The API and DB are documented well. Overall, it is a great CMS. There is a limited free version: http://www.kentico.com/freecms.aspx
I'm testing out DNN right now. So far, so good, but I think it depends a lot on what you are using it for. I've only been looking at it for 3 days, but so far I do find the documentation lacking or outdated.
I evaluated many of the different Portal/CMS systems out there back in 2004 and DotNetNuke ended up being my choice and I've been very pleased with it, for everything but E-Commerce, ever since. DotNetNuke is endlessly extensible, easy to skin, easy for non-technical folks to update, has a great 3rd party eco-system, and the development team is very active and talented. There isn't a great Articles module in the core but there are several really good ones available from 3rd parties for a reasonable price.
I tried using Joomla a few years ago and hated it. Wordpress is good for a blog style site but doesn't have nearly the power or flexibility of something like DNN. I am intrigued by SiteFinity, Umbraco, and Kentico for sites where all that's really needed is a CMS, but not enough that I've bothered trying them over DNN.
Another good .NET solution - from what I've read - is Umbraco.
Take a look at Kentico CMS. It's commercial, but still affordable. In my experience from dozens of projects on both CMS, Kentico is much more feature-rich, stable and well documented.
Or maybe other OS cms?
I want to form a members website, with registration, member profile and member personal photo galleries
What would you suggest? I'm pretty advanced with PHP just don't have the time to develop from scratch
I don't know much about Drupal but if you're using Joomla you may need to install something like Community Builder and/or Simple ACL. Joomla's default user management isn't great.
Drupal does what you are asking from a basic install with quite a degree of fine grained control over members, profiles, permissions etc. I have set several up with little or no extra modules, plugins or programming.
I actually run one site with several hundred members with not problems. I am not saying you cannot do this with Joomla, just have not had the experience. I think Drupal may well be more "community" oriented in this respect.
I vote for Drupal. Even Obama has voted for Drupal.
Joomla and Community Builder / JomSocial should be a nice pair.
In my experience, Drupal is far more flexible than Joomla. If you're comfortable with PHP, I'd recommend picking it.
Definitely Drupal, especially if you already know advanced PHP.
Nobody has great user features out of the box, but Drupal has more and better quality user-related modules.
Look at drupalmodules.com for 'user' modules in the 6.x versions, and you'll see tons of related modules for each one you check out.
There are modules for advanced profiles, for a percentage (of the profile) completed, user badges to make them feel special, imagecache for excellent image support, image upload with cropping, ckk and views can setup many different kinds of photo galleries from scratch so they are completely customized for your site, ubercart if you want to sell premium memberships, etc.
I think both Drupal and Joomla would be able to handle creating a basic version of what you describe. The turning point is going to be, what more you want to do.
One of Drupal's strengths is first truely uncovered when you develop. You can very easily customize the look and feel of your Drupal site. You'll have more fine grained control of both what it does and what how it outputs it's markup etc. It's a powerful tool, only downside is that it can be a bit hard to understand for normal people. But knowing PHP that shouldn't be a hindrance to you.
I already created 2 Drupal Sites and 1 Joomla Site with this Feature.
Since I've worked with Joomla some years too, I think I can give you some Hints on it:
Drupal is WAY more flexible and professional than Joomla. But you have to put some effort into it. But if you know how to use it, it will do what you want. And since Drupal itself is so flexible the core does handle almost every feature you need. So it is possible to mix a lot of features together and do things nobody has thinked of before.
If you use Joomla, you have to pick a module for this task (like CommunityBuilder http://www.joomlapolis.com/) and while this module is very powerful, it may work together with other modules, but likely it will not.