Deeson Online: Blog

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) which can be extended to provide e-commerce facilities with a module called UberCart. There are a couple of areas in which it is particularly powerful:

Selling access to content or digital products
In this situation all the benefits of Drupal's content management, search, rating and user experience features are available and transactions can be seamlessly processed with a basket.

Purchases (access to a video, download of a PDF, purchase of a book etc) can be easily managed using 'out of the box' UberCart features. Because everything involved is standard Drupal content, delivering reviews, recommendations and trailers is straightforward.

For example, the UberCart digital product purchase settings may be configured so users can login and download their purchased PDFs at any point in the future, providing a useful 'library' service.

We provided Drupal consultancy on the build of www.franklyecommerce.com, which makes extensive use of UberCart's features to allow users to buy access to online video training resources and a learning community.

A user experience integrated with the 'main' site
Without UberCart often a clunky external shopping cart program will be re-branded to (sort of) look like the main website and entail a whole separate system to be maintained and managed.

Users may be asked to register again to purchase (annoying and clunky) and it's very hard to cross promote products on the 'main' site, for example there is no site-wide basket.

There are the obvious sales benefits of being able to promote products effectively site-wide, as well as reduced friction on purchases through the use of existing registration details.

Because UberCart is just another Drupal module, it makes it a very good value way to add e-commerce to an existing site, as all the investment in features and style is utilised and only the e-commerce 'extras' need to be considered.

A simple example that we configured for a youth orientated, UK non-profit is www.participationworks.org.uk/order-resources

Alternatives
The other e-commerce platform we frequently use is Magento. Magento is a great platform when you have relatively standard e-commerce requirements, not much additional content and want a feature rich platform on a reasonable budget. www.fleshtunnel.co.uk is a good example of a Magento site that we delivered that required a striking design but no bespoke functionality.

In order for Magento to manage more significant amounts of content or deliver bespoke features the required budget increases significantly as there isn't the same rich set of modules and platform available as there is with Drupal. However because Magento is a dedicated e-commerce platform it does have excellent sales reporting, payment gateway and shipping support out of the box.

Basecamp is an online project management tool from 37signals. We use it extensively for all of our design and development projects. It is no exaggeration to say that without Basecamp, my job as a project manager would be considerably more stressful and our projects would run far less efficiently.

With a typical web build and design project, involving a project manager, a designer, a developer and a content administrator on the Deeson side, and often at least four stakeholders on the client side, there is potentially a huge amount of communication. Basecamp has the power to put this all in one place, where all parties are able to access it, with separate sections for messages, tasks and files.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the scenario of an email message between several recipients, each replying to ‘all’ and the thread getting longer and longer (and more indented), making it difficult to find who said what, when. And then someone only replies to the sender, so the thread gets fragmented. With Basecamp that message thread would be a simple chronological page of messages, with each message clearly identified with its sender.

Another important advantage of Basecamp over email is that all staff at Deeson will be able to access the messages, so in the event that the project manager is out of the office, someone else will be able to get up to speed with the project quickly.

The fact that our clients become Basecamp users means that they can fully collaborate within projects and have a good understanding of the progress. For example, if a client is reviewing a new site build, they can add any bugs and tweaks directly to a ‘to do’ list, alerting the relevant member of our team. The client will then be able to see when these have been completed.

Obviously there’s no substitute for phone calls and face-to-face communication, but Basecamp is great for assigning tasks during a meeting or call, meaning no one gets lumbered with the minute writing too!

Overview of features

The following is a brief overview of the main functions of Basecamp. This may be useful for new (and existing) clients:

Messages
We use this for project based communication, rather than email. If you are included within a message’s recipients list, you will receive a notification email each time someone posts to that message thread. To reply, you can simply reply to the email and it will be added to the message thread, automatically alerting the other message recipients – you can even include attachments on the email and these will be added to the project files. Alternatively, you can log into Basecamp and reply from the online interface.

To dos
We use these for specific tasks. They can be assigned to an individual and have due dates added. It is also possible to add comments to the ‘to dos’ which is useful for short discussions around a specific task.

Milestones
These are used for deadlines and date related tasks. It is possible to relate milestones to individual ‘to do’ lists, and for an individual to be alerted when a milestone is upcoming.

Writeboards
These are collaborative, editable documents which we generally use for documentation and specifications.

Files
The files section is used to store all project files such as wireframes, visuals, images and supplied text documents etc. The system is able to handle very large files, so this is our preferred means of transferring large PSDs, etc. When files are attached to messages, they are automatically added to the files section of Basecamp.

Search
The search function will search the whole Basecamp project.

The one failing of Basecamp is that if a new message or ‘to do’ is not assigned to anyone then no one will receive notification – potentially a message could go unnoticed. If you are not sure to whom a message or ‘to do’ should be assigned to, then please mark it for the project manager.

Basecamp has many applications outside of website development – for instance I recently moved house and my partner and I used Basecamp to keep track of the many tasks involved – the move became another project with tasks needing to be completed by certain milestones.

My partner was initially skeptical of using a system like this but soon came round to the idea when she realised she could assign ‘to dos’ to me (“cut the grass”, “clean the toilet”, etc, etc…). Lists on scraps of paper would certainly have been lost, whereas the ‘to do’ lists were easily accessible from my laptop or iPhone… including the fact I hadn’t done them, unfortunately!

An interesting week. Several new sites have been launched, some we can talk about and will write up later, but some we can't, including an Australian pop star's...

Deeson.co.uk has just been featured on Acquia's "Beautiful Drupal" design showcase, which is a compliment. I think Acquia are demonstrating the point with design.acquia.com that just because Drupal can be ugly in the wrong hands, it doesn't have to be.

Also spotted a tube poster for the Royal Society's Festival of Science + Arts at the Southbank Centre whilst out and about spreading the good Drupal word(!) Good to see the offline marketing engine is firing on all cylinders as we did the website.

Bygone Kent is the only local history magazine for the county.  Produced by Deeson Create, Publish and Words, we have just got in on the game and put together a brand new website for it!  Features include back-issue ordering, subscriptions, local news and online articles.  In fact, we used quite an interesting jQuery plugin called Columnizer for the articles pages.

Pop over and check out the site