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How To: Get Drupal & Ubercart Up & Running

Chase — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:09:02 +0000

I wrote a post quite a while back about Drupal & Ubercart and got an overwhelming response. So apparently my audience loves Ubercart! Which is a good thing considering Ubercart is “da bomb.com” if you know what I mean. So I wanted to take some time and put together a tutorial on how to Install Drupal & Ubercart and get it up and running. In this case I am using a Dreamhost server which works perfectly with Drupal and Ubercart.

Step 1: Download Drupal version 5 and Ubercart 1.7

At the time I am writing this tutorial, this is the most recent production version of Ubercart. And it requires version 5 of Drupal.

Let’s Install Drupal!

Step 2: Upload the Drupal contents into your directory of choice via FTP.

In this case I created a new directory called “Ubercart” and uploaded all files located in the “drupal” folder into it.

Step 3: Go to your Dreamhost Control Panel and login

Step 4: Go to Goodies >> MySQL Databases

Step 5: Create Database, Add database to a Hostname and MySQL User

In this step, we are creating a MySQL database. Then connecting that database to a hostname and MySQL user. Then jot this information down as you will need it when running the Drupal installation wizard.

Step 6: Run The Drupal Installation Wizard

To run the Drupal installation wizard, go to your directory via your web browser. Drupal will now direct you to a screen which asks you for your database details that you just setup in Dreamhost. Fill those out and hit the “save configuration” button. With Dreamhost, remember that “Localhost” will not work and that you need to click the “Advanced Options” link below and fill out your specific host name.

Step 7: Create The First Drupal Account To Finish Drupal Installation

The image below highlights the link that you are then directed to to create the first main user for your new Drupal installation. This is an important step to finishing your Drupal install. Once you do this a password will be auto generated for you. Be sure to change this password to your password of choice.

Now Let’s Install Ubercart!

Step 8: Upload the required Drupal modules for Ubercart to work properly

Next you need to install a few modules. Create a directory called “modules” inside the sites/all directory. Download, extract, and upload the following modules into your new “modules” directory.

Step 9: Active these new modules in your module administration

Go back to your new Drupal installation and go to the Module administration page. Now you want to activate the modules exactly how you see the image below.

Step 10: Upload image modules for image capability

Next we probably want to show images with our products. To do this we need to install a few more modules to allow Ubercart to do this. Download, extract, and upload the following modules into your sites/all/modules directory.

Content Construction Kit (CCK) Only the Content module is needed.
Image Field
Imagecache
Thickbox

Step 11: Active these modules in your Module Administration page

Now we want to go back to the Module Administration page and activate these modules. For the CCK, all we need to activate is the module called “Content” to make Ubercart work properly.

Step 12: Upload and Activate the Ubercart Module

Now it’s time to finally upload and activate the Ubercart module. Take your Ubercart folder and upload it just like you have been uploading your other modules. Go back to your module administration page and activate the REQUIRED ubercart modules as shown below.

Step 13: Activate other useful Ubercart Modules and customize your theme

You will notice that there are dozens of other modules that you can activate that are optional with Ubercart. These modules extend Ubercart’s functionality. Go through these and start activating the ones you are going to need. Then start customizing your Drupal theme and start making your site look more like an online store!

That’s it! You now have Drupal and Ubercart working perfectly on a Dreamhost web hosting server. I picked Dreamhost because their control panel is very user friendly, and their servers come with all the necessary requirements to make Drupal and Ubercart run correctly. If you have any more specific questions about Ubercart feel free to contact me or leave a comment in the thread.

7 Reasons to Use Ubercart!

Chase — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:52:22 +0000

The author over at Top Notch Themes recently put together a cool blog post where he talked about Ubercart and why you should use it for your ecommerce solution. I personally am using Ubercart for my own ecommerce sites as well as all of my clients. I think it’s a great cart system and because it is made for the Drupal CMS it’s even better. Here are the 7 reasons that Steph listed in the article:

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration.

2) Stable release for Drupal 5, significant progress on Drupal 6 version

Ubercart for Drupal 5 has been at a stable 1.x branch since the beginning of June. While itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s not yet stable, there is a dev version out for Drupal 6, and I know of at least one brave soul using it on a live site already. This is a testament to the active development community of Ubercart.

3) Ubercart is highly represented at Drupal events

There have been sessions on Ubercart at the last three Drupalcons, numerous local Drupal camps, FrOScon, etc. Ubercart even held their own Ubercamp this summer, for developers and interested parties to get together for a weekend of coding and planning.

4) Very active community

Dozens of new forum posts a day from its 3500 registered users, numerous code commits every week, and several community-contributed modules added or updated each week. The support time for issues and forum posts is very quick.

5) High visibility outside of the Drupalsphere

This is nearly unheard of for Drupal modules, but given UbercartÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s high visibility, itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s actually been a big draw for users coming into Drupal itself for the first time. They also recently had a mention in PC Magazine.

6) Full time developers with commercial backing

While the Drupal project itself has been proof that full time, funded developers arenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t needed to create a great product, in the world of e-commerce, itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s certainly helped. There are currently two (soon to be three) full time Ubercart developers, and an estimated dozen or so more from other organizations who also do only Ubercart development.

7) Focus on being user friendly

The Ubercart developers donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t want you to have to be a developer to set up an online store. There are a million settings and configuration possibilities for creating an online store, but theyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ve put a strong focus on the UI, simple checkout, and intelligent defaults. This goes a long way in deploying a site right the first time, that looks great.

All these and many more are reasons that you should jump on the Ubercart bandwagon now if you have not already! An important thing to mention, especially for all the Joomla and Wordpress fanatics is that Ubercart is not some “plugin” like other CMS projects have for ecommerce. It’s clear that Ubercart is seperating itself as it’s own ecommerce platform entirely that integrates perfectly with the Drupal CMS

Easily Setup SSL & Authorize.net with Ubercart

Chase — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:38:44 +0000

Alright you’ve seen me write about Ubercart, the open source shopping cart for Drupal many times before. And I have been using Ubercart for various different projects with much success. But until recently, I never had the change in a project to use Ubercart with integration to an Authorize.net merchant account. I was very surprised how easy this was. Here is exactly what happened.

1) Since my client’s website was being hosted on Bluehost which also ranks in the top 3 for their ecommerce web hosting services reviewed and listed by web hosting search, I had my client purchase a secure certificate from Bluehost. Because he purchased it from Bluehost, their techs setup the SSL and did all the work without me having to do really anything.

2) Configured the Authorize.net API by providing Ubercart with my cient’s Authorize.net user id and password. To do this you need to activate the Authorize.net module and the Credit Card module.

3) Setup a directory outside of my docroot for my credit card encryption key to be stored. When setting up your Authorize.net module you will be notified to do this.

4) Went through all the Ubercart settings just to make sure that everything was setup exactly how I wanted it.

5) Downloaded and installed the Secure Pages module for Drupal. This module allows you to specify specific url’s within your site that you want to be under an HTTPS instead of just the regular HTTP.

6) Under the Secure Pages settings, I set the following url’s to be under an HTTPS with my newly setup Bluehost SSL…

user
user/*
user/*/edit
admin
admin/*
cart/checkout
cart/checkout/review
cart/checkout/payment_details/*
cart/checkout/complete

That’s It! Done! And Everything Works Great! That’s all I had to do and it worked perfectly. I have never had this quick of results when setting up an SSLÃ‚Â and hooking into the Authorize.net API. Despite the many shopping carts that claim how easy this is supposed to be, Ubercart provided in my own experience by far the easiest solution.

Drupal + Ubercart = Simple Shopping Cart

Chase — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:58:46 +0000

“I need a simple shopping cart” is a simple yet complicated demand that hear often from many of my clients. “Simple, just need to be able to sell a couple of products on my website.” If only they knew how difficult such a “simple” thing can be. What to do? Setup Zencart? OS Commerce? Just build my own from scratch? Having just a simple shopping cart can be quite the task for a developer when a business has such a demand, yet such a small budget. I have been battling this dilemma for over 2 years now.

A good place to start is with a content management system, then find a way for a small shopping cart plugin to integrate into it. That way it’s not a big cart system like Zencart, and it’s still content manageable unlike the custom one you might be considering building. But two of the most popular CMS systems don’t have great shopping cart plugins that fully integrate with the CMS system itself. Joomla and Wordpress! Sure there are many plugins available, but not any that truly integrate with the CMS itslef.

That’s where Drupal CMS has the advantage. With the Ubercart plugin for Drupal, you get a simple shopping cart setup that integrates perfectly with your drupal CMS system. I have found this to work perfectly for me. Using the drupal “node” system, you can create a specefic node for each individual product. This allows you to setup a smaller number of products, and get the huge SEO benefits that come from the Drupal system. Things like URL Aliases and so forth. Now, because of Drupal you can have a CMS, blog, newsletter, shopping cart, and much much more all integrated seamlessly into the same site. I can tell you from personal experience that Joomla and Wordpress do not come close to providing this integrated combination as well as Drupal.

And for you developers out there, the drupal template system is way better than Zen Cart and OS Commerce combined. The admin interface is easier to learn. And you can create individual product pages, create a product catalog, or do both. You are not tied to one, unlike Zen Cart and the other major e-commerce systems. So the next time you are in need of a simple shopping cart solution, try giving Drupal a try along with the drupal Ubercart plugin. It won’t let you down.

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