We recently helped Ker-Ching!! relaunch their site using Drupal (V5) and Ubercart (V1), the flexibility and control now available to the site administrators will now allow them to concentrate on running the company and not trying to update the site.
Homepage and overall site design
We wanted to make the user experience of the site as easy as possible to not only give the user support and reassurance but also to obviously help with sales.
The Drupal system allowed us the flexibility in design we are used to but also joined up extremly well with the functional aspects of the Ubercart e-commerce system.
This enabled us to give our designers a free hand with the design as our development dept. had already reviewed and okayed the system.
A few key things on the homepage to point out for other site developers would be the featured product on the homepage is a view loading a random single product out of all the items that have been marked with being featured (CCK checkbox).
The quick product overview below that is another view which calls back all product categories (Custom content type) and lists them down the page in the style of a category list, but with a bit more control over the text and images used.
All of this is then pulled in together using panels to show multiple views on the same page.
Ubercart product setup
From a technical point of view we didn't change any of the core files that make up the Ubercart system, what we did do though is use the Drupal naming system to create template files for the product details pages. While then linking directly into all the items Ubercart supplied as default.
Most of the products on the site have options available to it, again this is something we did not need to worry about as its just another option in the standard Ubercart system.
Using the template (.tpl) files for the product details page allows us further control over what is shown to the site user. An example of this would be if the site administrators decide to start using multiple product images then we have already put in-place the design and JavaScript to swap out additional thumbnails with the main product image. Using the .tpl files allowed us to check for multiple images and use these extra features if required.
The only other additions we added to the Product type (using CCK) was to add a "special offer" checkbox. This allows the site admin to jump into any product and put it on special offer, which then gets the special offer sticker shown as part of the design and also to be listed in the special offer listings page.
Many thanks to all at Ubercart, and the support of the forums.
Vince
