Drupal Shopwindow Module Released

[jonnyplatt]

I've finally pulled my finger out and released the shopwindow module I'd developed for Drupal.

New since the last announcement is the ability to create product 'nodes' - which store the SW data in drupal's content management system allowing you to add reviews, descriptions, categorise things, essentially allowing you to build very tight little niche sites or price comparison sites, with the advantage of drupal's community building facilities.

For an example of the new functionality I'd recommend taking alook at the price comparison on rectifi (http://www.rectifi.org.uk).

The blog post I made annoucing the launch can be found here (http://www.rectifi.org.uk/drupal-shopwindow-module-launched) and the drupal project page here (http://drupal.org/project/shopwindow)

I think this module makes setting up your shop and making it unique a far simpler process, particularly for those who have experience with Drupal. I hope you all like it! If you have problems please use the issue tracker on the project page to help me keep up with all comments etc.

Cheers!
Jonny

[cicero]

Johnny - this is brilliant. A fantastic was to further enhance shopwindow and Drupal. I have installed it but am now waiting for my SW account to be reset. Might have some questions later but it looks fantastic.

Thanks for you hard work on it.

[jonnyplatt]

No worries, I hope it helps people out in getting going.

I think it'll give people shops that are much easier to rank with if they create specific product nodes rather than slapping up the whole feed at once, and I'm very interested to see how people use it in collaboration with other drupal features.

[cicero]

I am guessing that the products are not added as nodes and are therefore updated as the ShopWindow content updates? So the products are not added to the Drupal DB rather pulled to the page on-the-fly.

If that is the case and I add a CCK style to the content - as in add other fields will the content be added in to my DB? And if so will that mean it will never be up to date once it is made a permanent node?

Or am I mis-understanding it?

Thanks
(PS - Can't get the blocks working yet but working on it - pages look great)

[cicero]

Hi Johnny - I got blocks working fine now - looks good. I also have it all set I think. There is only one thing not working now and that is that it has hijacked my search box. When I search on my site with the module on it starts to search and instead of ending up at search/node/battery for example it ends up at browse// (with two forward slashes) - odd? I am using iTheme theme if that helps.

PS - The ecommerce package also has a 'product' content type - could this conflict somewhere?

[Gerry]

Hi Johnnyplatt

Excellent work on this integration with Drupal. I just have to learn the basics of Drupal now.

Thanks for putting the time in.

Gerry

[jonnyplatt]

Hi sorry for my delays in responding, I don't seem to be getting notification emails when threads are updated any more.

Cicero - re storing the data as nodes:
When using the /browse/cat arrangement there is no storage in your database, the information is pulled in live.

When using the CCK product nodes the data is stored in your database. This is partly due to performance issues my end and partly as I could not get Views to work with my custom fields without storing the data. You can edit the field properties so the data is loaded each time (simply uncheck 'Store this data in the database' for each field types) but then you can't use Views. Alternatively you could do as I have done and write a cron script to automatically update them every x days.

Product node conflict - Yes, this is possible but only if you are currently running the ecommerce module too. If you aren't there should be no problem, and if you are you should be given the option to name your content type when you import from the text file - just give it another name like sw_product, price_comparison or whatever you want, it will make no difference.

*ahem* I forgot about the search box. It never got finished - on my sites I hand coded one. It shouldn't be hijacking Drupal's search, however - I suspect what is happening instead is you have enabled the module's search block which doesn't work rather than enabling drupal's native search block.

Hope this helps!

[Boris]

Hi,

will this be updated for Drupal 6 at all?

I am new to Drupal and ShopWindow, is there another way to do the equivalent in Drupal 6?

cheers
Boris