It didn't take long to get the smashing
glass webshop site together and able to take credit card payments online
with paypal and drupal
- a small retailers match made in heaven. This site runs on Drupal 4.7 which
is real sweet, totally intuitive with lots of help it is a beautiful system.

Here is a webshop howto tutorial then:

Get a webserver with a webhost.

It must run PHP and a database - I used MySQL.
I was recommended to get a LAMP server - that acronym is LINUX, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
All of the above are free software, free to use and modify - the lack of liscensing fees mean even a wee webshop can get going without undue costs.
I found a webhost jmhz who were prepared to help get all the drupal stuff going. This is helpful but I hear drupal is very easy to install :-).
This should cost ~£50 for a years hosting.

Get a domain

for us this was smashingglass.com should cost £5 to £15 for a .com I have been recommended to use namecheap for $8.88 per .com
point the domain at your webhosts nameservers your new hosts will provide you with this information. Just look around for nameserver in the menus at your domain registrars.

Add e-commerce to drupal

Download the e-commerce module and the image module from drupal.org
unzip them
upload them with a FTP file transfer program, I used Filezilla (again free) to the /modules directory of your drupal installation.

goto yoursite/admin/modules and enable the eccomerce modules and paypal and the image modules.
enter your paypal details into the paypal page under admin/settings
goto yoursite/admin/blocks and enable the cart

Now create content --> image and it has a product tab --> add a price and your in stock.

That is it - you now have a webshop and can take card payments online all for around about the price of ten beers - remember to send some beer money to the opensource developers who you are relying on.

Change the look

I uploaded a new theme I got from Drupal.org and tweaked the style.css file in the theme folder a little.
Themeing was easy: download, unzip and then ftp the new folder into the themes folder of your drupal install and then web over to yoursite.com/admin/themes and enable it.

I use the GIMP to edit my images (yes it is free) and just saved my images over the default theme images.

If you want to go totally free then try Ubuntu a free LINUX that comes with everything, it comes as a bootable live CD so you can try it and it can install install itself alongside windows.

I'll try and add some more details about themeing drupal with css web design. Hope this helps.

8-)

islander's blog | login or register to post comments | email this page