Product Description
Build, administer, and customize an online store using Drupal with Ubercart Create a powerful e-shop using the award-winning CMS Drupal and the robust e-commerce module Ubercart Create and manage the product catalog and insert products in manual or batch mode Apply SEO (search engine optimization) to your e-shop and adopt turn-key internet marketing techniques Implement advanced techniques like cross-selling, product comparison, coupon codes, and segmented pr… More >>
At first glance at the title of this book, you might be tempted to think that it is not too much more than a reference guide to the complex Ubercart module. Surprisingly, you’re only half right. While the authors, George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, do a great job of covering almost all aspects of the modules that ship with Ubercart, they also go way beyond that. It turns out this book is actually a pretty good guide for not only configuring your Drupal-powered ecommerce site, but also quite valuable in the planning, promoting, and tracking phases as well.
As you’d expect, the authors do a nice job covering the many modules that need to be enabled and configured for a basic Ubercart site. In many cases they go screen-by-screen in the configuration – something that isn’t easy to make very engaging. They cover Ubercart’s conditional actions functionality quite nicely and how it can be used to configure tax and shopping modules. They also cover product classes and product kits – two very powerful features of Ubercart that every site admin should leverage.
Where the book really shines though is in the descriptions of all the various topics (mainly other modules) in the Ubercart universe. They wisely provide information about popular supporting modules that many ecommerce sites lack, including wish lists, product recommendations, and coupon codes. It is effective use of modules like these that really make ecommerce sites useful.
Overall, this book is a nice surprise. At well over 350 pages, it is beefier than most Drupal books, and provides a wealth of practical information that most Ubercart-powered sites will benefit from.
Rating: 4 / 5
In this book, George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras take the reader through the
basics of using Ubercart within Drupal system, with a heavy emphasis on all the key
concepts of the module, in this way, the work may be considered a step by step guide for
making your own 1st e-commerce site.
First of all, we can consider the Ubercart module as a very good way to automate the
building of a backbone of an ecommerce site. In fact, in the
past three years it evolved, making a tout-court solution over a growing vision that goes
from the product creation to the management of
workflow for orders to the payment methods integration.
The incredible thing is the simple way of use of Ubercart module also for the newbyes of
Drupal system.
Starting from this points this book contain many good things, in particular the detailed level
of description makes this book useful both for a technical reader and for a newbye user at
first approach to the system,that is rarely seen for this kind of book.
Each chapter uses a well thought out example based approach and in every chapter, the
book will:
- Introduce any new concepts that are key to understanding the chapters content;
- Introduce the concepts and clearly state its goals and objectives;
- Explain the author intentions about using the characteristics presented;
- Explain a step-by-step completion of the configuration and basic use, from start to end
with lots of screenshots, tips, and explanations of important key points along the way.
Each of the example projects is presented in such a way that is easy to follow and often
quite compelling to read.
The main goal of the book is to see an ecommerce site grow up as a short and sweet
project, but as the book progresses and the techniques used become more familiar,
it gradually build up giving to the developer the possibility to continue with a big one.
The chapter that impressed me is the fourth “Managing Product and Categories”,
expecially for the import method of a large database of products,
very interesting and complete method, reviewed deeply in the last version of ubercart and
useful for any kind of company’s ecommerce site.
Towards the end of the book the author preferred to dedicate some paragraph to third-
party systems integration(CRM, twitter etc..), a good starting point for a complete system
development in these years where the need of user communities and feedbacks are a
must have characteristics.
The ability of creating a complete book with chapters for Drupal configuration from zero is
a good choice coupled with detailed and comprehensive explanations, often dotted with
additional notes and useful tips, making this work a good starting source for everyone
wants to use Drupal for ecommerce.
Rating: 4 / 5