I recently helped a friend setting up his new E-commerce site (http://www.weinerwraps.com/) using Drupal. We were considering a few modules, and finally decided on using UberCart. Now, our site isn't flashy, or have fancy graphics, but getting it functional was really easy. What we currently have working is

• Paypal payment option
• USPS shipping (with shipping calculations)
• Basic cart features, different products, checkout options etc.

We've had a few issues on the way, most notably (and very confusing) was that the shipping cost calculator stops working if you disable the country field from the user entry for the shipping address. This made absolutely no sense to me (since we only ship to the US), and there were no errors or indicators whatsoever. Clearly someone didn't think through a typical use case scenario here ... Other open issues include

• We have an optional addition to each order, for embroidery, where we'd like the price to be adjusted based on the length of the entered text.
• There's no way to make the product picture adjust to selected options. There are a few modules that claim to do this, but none that really works.

All in all, setting up an E-commerce site with Drupal and UberCart has been a pretty good experience.

This collection of pages is my own personal experience with various 3rd party Drupal modules. I'm not really saying you must have these modules, but I personally find them incredibly useful. I'm not ranking these modules in any particular order, instead I'm trying to organize them by functionality. If you have suggestions for modules that I ought to include here, please let me know, and I'll be happy to add them (after I try 'em of course).

Content related modules

The modules in this section either create new content types, or let you manipulate or create content types.

CCK

The CCK module is probably the most important module here, it's a very flexible system that lets you create new content types, or add new custom fields to existing content types. This really is a must have, I actually don't understand why it's not part of core Drupal. There's a number of extra "plugins" for CCK, here are a few that I always add

• email - Add email fields
• phone - Add phone number fields (including international numbers!)
• drupal.org/project/filefieldfilefield - Add file fields
• imagefield - Add image fields

Date

The Date module is a combination of a complete Date related API, and various extensions for content types, and it integrates nicely with CCK for example.

Images and image manipulation

There's a large number of modules related to images, how to manage and display them, as well as manipulate them. Here's a small collection of must-have's.

I finally finished migrating http://www.ogre.com/ to Drupal v6. This was a pretty painful experience, as usual with Drupal, but not as bad as the Sharks site upgrade. The biggest pain is usually "complex" modules like Views and CCK. In particular, the Views module does a piss poor job of converting the old views to the new version... Expect to change a lot of configurations after the migration :-/.

The other pain right now is that the Node Relativity module is not functional for Drupal 6. This mean that some navigation of this site is currently broken, I hope to have it fixed as soon as possible.

Introduction

Before upgrade

Upgrading Drupal

Upgrading CCK

thor $ mysql -u foo -p
mysql> update content_node_field_instance set widget_active=1 where widget_active=0;
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 2  Changed: 2  Warnings: 0

mysql> update content_node_field set active=1 where active=0;
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 2  Changed: 2  Warnings: 0

Before (using CCK validation):

$dvd = $node->field_id_of_dvd[0]['nid'];
$checksum = crc32($dvd);
...
if (strval($checksum) !== $node->field_validation_code[0]['value']) {
  form_set_error('field_validation_code','this is not the correct validation code for this DVD');
}

After (using Validation API):

$dvd = $form_state['values']['field_id_of_dvd'][0]['nid'];
$checksum = crc32($dvd);
....
if (strval($checksum) !== $value) {
  return FALSE;
}
return TRUE;

Upgrading Views

Upgrading the Image module

Missing / replaced modules

What's next?

Who needs CPAN with Drupal and the Update Status module (http://drupal.org/project/update_status). Using this module, it's really a no brainer to keep your site up to date with all the latest updates to the Drupal core and contributed modules you have installed. It'll tell you which modules needs an update, the severity (e.g. Security related), and if there are some optional (typically beta or "dev") versions available. To make things easy, you can even have it email you when there are updates available. And there is of course a GUI component as well, which lets you instantly view the status of all the modules.

It's a must have for any Drupal adminstrator.

I started playing with the Drupal charts APIs a while ago, which uses Google's excellent charting APIs. This mostly worked well, except that the bar charts "class" did not support modifying the spacing between groups of bars. So, here's a small patch that solves this.

--- chart.module.orig   2008-12-23 09:53:48.000000000 -0800
+++ chart.module        2008-12-23 09:52:01.000000000 -0800
@@ -549,7 +549,7 @@
       
     // Bar chart bar sizing
     case 'chbh':
-      $data[$attr] .= implode(',', array($value['#size'], $value['#spacing']));
+      $data[$attr] .= implode(',', array($value['#size'], $value['#spacing'], $value['#group_spacing']));
       break;
       
      // Mixed axis positions, labels and styles
@@ -1028,10 +1028,11 @@
 * 
 * @return array
 */
-function chart_bar_size($size = 40, $spacing = 20) {
+function chart_bar_size($size = 40, $spacing = 20, $group_spacing = 30) {
   return array(       
       '#size'    => $size,  
       '#spacing' => $spacing,  
+      '#group_spacing' => $group_spacing,  
     );
 }

SourceForge recently changed their site to put their Apache servers behind a "pool" of Nginx reverse proxies (accelerators). This is a good idea, but has negative impact on various Drupal features, like, logs, ACLs etc. I've made a small hack on my http://pysearch.sourceforg.net/ Drupal installation, like this:

--- includes/bootstrap.inc.5.10 2008-09-23 08:53:05.000000000 -0600
+++ includes/bootstrap.inc      2008-09-20 10:14:52.000000000 -0600
@@ -5,6 +5,9 @@
  * @file
  * Functions that need to be loaded on every Drupal request.
  */
+if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REMOTE_ADDR']) {
+    $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REMOTE_ADDR'];
+}
 
 /**
  * Indicates that the item should never be removed unless explicitly told to

Granted, this needs to be configurable, I'm thinking a general Drupal setting where we can tell which Header to use to replace REMOTE_ADDR.

Here are some Drupal hacks and modifications that I've done.

I couldn't get the breadcrumb trails (menu) to work with my pages / stories that I structure with node relativity (a Drupal module). I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but looking at the code, I couldn't see any support for it. So, here it is, a quick and dirty hack to add the breadcrumb trails to your node relativity structures:

--- relativity.module-2.4       2008-09-17 19:44:07.000000000 -0700
+++ relativity.module   2008-09-18 07:49:10.000000000 -0700
@@ -378,6 +378,14 @@
     '#title' => t('Global Options'),
   );
 
+  $group['global_options']['relativity_breadcrumb_trails'] = array(
+    '#type' => 'checkbox',
+    '#title' => t('Update the breadcrumb trails menu'),
+    '#return_value' => 1,
+    '#default_value' => variable_get('relativity_breadcrumb_trails', 0),
+    '#description' => t('If checked, the ancestor hiearchy of the page is used to create the breadcrumb trail menu.'),
+  );
+
   $group['global_options']['relativity_allow_types'] = array(
     '#type' => 'select',
     '#title' => t('Node types that can be involved in relationships'),
@@ -1067,13 +1075,35 @@
       break;
 
     case 'view':
-      if ($w = variable_get('relativity_'.$node->type.'_ancestor_weight', 0)) {
+      $do_breadcrumbs = variable_get('relativity_breadcrumb_trails', FALSE);
+      $ancestors_w = variable_get('relativity_'.$node->type.'_ancestor_weight', 0);
+
+      if ($do_breadcrumbs || $ancestors_w) {
         $ancestors = relativity_load_ancestors($node);
+
         if (is_array($ancestors) && count($ancestors) > 0) {
-          $node->content['relativity_ancestors'] = array(
-            '#value' => theme('relativity_show_ancestors', $node, $ancestors),
-            '#weight' => $w,
-          );
+          if ($do_breadcrumbs) {
+            $breadcrumb[] = l(t('Home'), NULL);
+            foreach($ancestors as $ancestor) {
+              if (!is_array($ancestor)) { // Only handle single ancestors here
+                if (array_key_exists("path", $ancestor)) {
+                  $breadcrumb[] = l($ancestor->title, $ancestor->path);
+                } else {
+                  $breadcrumb[] = l($ancestor->title, 'node/'. $ancestor->nid);
+                }
+              }
+            }
+            if (count($breadcrumb) > 1) {
+              drupal_set_breadcrumb($breadcrumb);
+            }
+          }
+
+          if ($ancestors_w) {
+            $node->content['relativity_ancestors'] = array(
+              '#value' => theme('relativity_show_ancestors', $node, $ancestors),
+              '#weight' => $ancestors_w,
+            );
+          }
         }
       }

And yes, I did file a "issue" for this, with the Drupal people, http://drupal.org/node/309982 .