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Drupal CMS e-Commerce Module Basics

By Michael J. Ross
2008-08-20

Introduction
Regular e-commerce shopping carts work fine if the functionality of the store site is limited to listing products, allowing customers to purchase them, accepting credit card payments, and all of the other e-commerce features offered by these shopping cart solutions. But what if you also want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds — shopping carts and CMSs?

Fortunately, the answer is yes, if you choose a world-class CMS such as Drupal as a foundation for your site. All of the functionality of Drupal is organized into modules, some of which are built into any initial installation (known as "core" modules — some of which are required for Drupal to function). There are even more third-party modules created by outside developers, and most of those are made freely available. Some of them are intended for making a Drupal-powered Web site able to operate as an online store, and of these, the e-Commerce module is the most capable and widely known. However, the online documentation for the module is quite lacking, which is typical of open source projects that exist only because one or a few developers can find the spare time to devote to the project, with little time left over for external documentation.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to create an online store using Drupal and the e-Commerce module — specifically, installing the necessary components, listing products for sale, setting tax rates, and other critical e-commerce tasks.




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