Ben, I noticed you didn't get my PM from Friday, so I thought I'd repost the info here. (That way others can see it, too.)

"Just had a chance to briefly read your post and am excited about the work you're going to be doing! I just wanted to send you a quick message that I'm heading out of the office right now, but if you've gotta do some work over the weekend here's one lead - you can use the Content Templates module for individual node type design. That's what I do here and elsewhere (albeit very lightly). If you like, though, you can also create individual template files in your theme itself. I would advise you to do this because the UI isn't that great for the Contemplate module and it looks like you'll need to have good access to it. I believe the process is just creating a node-type.tpl.php file in your theme, like node-product.tpl.php for product nodes or node-story.tpl.php for story nodes. You might want to verify that through a Google search on Drupal.org, though. ; )"

Mike should be able to verify that as well, or some of the other developers here. I just think it'll save you some of the headache I run into when modifying templates. The module can be good to preview the available fields, though, so you may use it just to examine what variables nodes generate for displaying data.

For populating your tables w/ data from a database... do you already have this data entered somewhere? If not, you may consider using the product class system. You can create a new class for each type of product and then add fields using CCK per product. You can make these fields not required and then theme the output however you wish. (You could even choose to hide them and then handle the query yourself to load the data.)

Regarding teasers, these are fairly standard Drupal features. You can only specify one teaser per node. You can use a little PHP snippet to load the teaser from any page in your site and input that in a page, although I think the quickest thing for you to do will be to use a custom query.

As for the pricing difference, I believe you can use the discounts contribution to give a cheaper price based on a user's account role. If not, we should look into adding that functionality. Many folks have mentioned it in the past. Also, you can use the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module to restrict access to certain parts of your site for people with the wholesaler account role.

I don't have a CSV order export done yet, but it wouldn't be hard to accomplish. I'd be happy to incorporate any code you come up with or look into developing my own format in the future.

Basically, if you don't know a little bit of PHP/MySQL yourself, I'd seriously consider hiring someone that can do the custom queries and bits of display that will allow you to do the things you want to do. I'm really impressed with the design, and I think you'll need the custom code - it will save you a lot of frustration trying to use various modules to get the same jobs done.

After some side project detractions, I'm back at the grindstone. I ordered Pro Drupal Development and found it to be a big help in understanding how everything fits together. I've managed to get my XHTML-CSS template into a custom Drupal theme and an fairly happy with it now. The only hard part has been finding out which function overrides I need to add to my template.php in order to get the desired HTML output formatted for my design. Now that my template is pretty much finished, I need to start tweaking the Ubercart output.

I have started to add some products to play around with. I have a question on what the best practice is for setting up my secondary navigation links for the products and creating all of the catalog vocabulary terms. If you look at my template designed I linked to above, you can see that I want a secondary navigation menu on the left that lists all of my catalog categories. Is there any way that I can create my navigation menu links when I create the catalog vocabulary terms?

After looking around for a while, it appears that I will have to create all of my catalog categories and then create all of my menu items which should be identical. I think it would be a nice feature if you could combine the menu creation form input boxes and the catalog category creation form input boxes on one page that will create both at the same time.

The other solution I can see to this would be to create a custom block that will query the database for all of the catalog categories and output a list of links.

Which do you think would be the better way to create the secondary navigation links? I'm interested in whatever way will be the most automated. Once I add a product, I want it to automatically show up in the navigation box.

Perfect! That's exactly what I needed. I knew there had to be a better way.

Here's another related question. The way my site's navigation is setup, what you call "Catalog" is what I want to refer to in my links, URLs, breadcrumbs and headers as "Products". It appears that what you call "Products" is a list of all of the products that does not show what category they belong to. Is it possible for me to rename these Catalog -> Products and Products -> All-Products. Will this cause Ubercart serious issues? Should I edit the actual module, or is there a function override that I can use? Is Ubercart setup for international languages where I can use the t('Catalog') feature that I see in some other modules to rename them?

Thanks for all of your help and quick responses.

I can't seem to override the default "/products" page when I set the Catalog vocabulary name to "Products" and change the URL in "/admin/store/settings/catalog/edit" to "Products". When I goto /products, it loads the all products page and not the catalog page. What creates the /products all products page and how can I disable it?

Thanks again,
you guys ROCK!

One thing to consider is you can turn off individual menu items at admin/build/menu. You can't necessarily rename paths like you're looking for, but you can always use Views to make a custom all products listing at /products-all. For an example, see this page on bwv's site:

http://www.greystokefarm.com/store/all_products

The negative side effect is that next time you update, you'll lose the changes. This isn't maintainable in the long run. From the menu administration form, you should be able to disable the default products listing URL and then not worry about it any more.

I think I'm going to remove that page altogether and instead make that a default View for folks with Views turned on. Having Views integration in core makes this possible now.

One thing to do would be to go to your content types administration for your product node types and click on the "Display fields" tab. Here you can turn on the images to display in teasers. This will put them in the object for the teaser... but you can simply theme the teaser to not display images if you don't want to.

If that doesn't work, you may indeed need a database query.

Awesome. I'm glad you're making good progress and can't wait to see the finished page.

Heh, I guess you're one of the people who used the "Add a product" link in the store administration menu.

That got taken out because there was already a place to do that in the Create Content page. Since product classes became node types, that page became more important because it was the only way to create products of different classes. We figured it would be confusing if people made product classes, but then couldn't create them through the old "Add a product" link. This also makes it feel more like Drupal because that's where all the node types are created.

Sorry for the extra confusion.