trewebs

The Internet florist & gift store www.fabryka-prezentow.pl is pretty much completed, development wise. It doesn’t have many products yet and some of the content is still in English, but I wanted to write this post because I encountered several development issues that I wanted to write about. Hopefully even clarify and solve some of them. There are three major issues.

1. Taxonomy pages / Ubercart catalog disconnection and page duplication
2. Breadcrumbs and navigational issues due to the above
3. Mixed-mode SSL with Boost and Ubercart - that will be covered in the next blog post this week.

So just read on for the juice.

1. In one sentence: use pathauto to create aliases for taxonomy terms like that: catalog/[term:tid] (the last being the token for term id) AND create aliases for catalog pages like that: [term:vocabulary]/[term:name] (again, tokens).

Explanation: Ubercart catalog module is a great way of sorting and displaying products in your e-store. It was based on taxonomy – great idea, the Drupal way to go. However, it creates duplicates pages for all the taxonomy terms from the vocabulary used. The problem was taken on several times, for instance here, here, and here. The solutions are either for Drupal 6, non-existing or total overkill like disabling taxonomy pages all together. That last thing is probably the reason why catalog pages were designed to duplicate taxonomy pages – the only reason that comes to my mind is the authors didn’t want to drastically change the taxonomy pages. The only issue I found with my solution is that if you have menus linking to taxonomy terms / catalog pages, you may need to adjust them every time you edit those menu item.

Anyway, having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing for SEO. My solution partly deals with that. The fact is, you can still manually access the mysite.com/catalog/[term:tid] page, but direct links to taxonomy pages do redirect to catalog pages which have semantic urls, based on whatever vocabulary is used. All the links on the website redirect there too, save for the links in pathauto module configuration. As I wrote, the catalog/[term:tid] pages can still be accessed, because they are considered aliases and modules like redirect or global redirect don’t check if those aliases are redirected once more – which is what happens in this case. What is needed now is to create stable path redirects from catalog/[term:tid] to [term:vocabulary]/[term:name], that will work no matter how the link is accessed. The problem is, there is no module for drupal 7 that would do that based on arguments or tokens. The Path Redirect module works isn’t ported to Drupal 7, the Rules module doesn’t have a trigger that would happen on a term page being browsed, and the Redirect module can’t assign a batch action for creating redirects. So basically that’s just what’s needed now – create a module that extends the Redirect module with batch redirect creation. That will also allow the Taxonomy Tree module to be used with Ubercart Catalog – because Ubercart Catalog Taxonomy Menu module is, unfortunately, abandoned. I am commencing work on that. In the meantime – my solution works well when it’s coupled with solution #2 (which is independently important).

2. The ubercart catalog breadcrumbs. This solution fixes them and ensures for semantic urls. They get duplicated and sometimes lead to taxonomy pages instead of catalog pages, which is a bad thing because the catalog pages add the Ubercart Catalog taxonomy view where relevant, in addition to the products (taxonomy pages only do the latter). So, first thing to do is disable the Catalog breadcrumbs in mysite.com/admin/store/settings/catalog. While there, I am using the grid catalog display, haven’t tried this solution with the table display. I also disabled showing breadcrumbs by default in my theme configuration and manually set the breadcrumbs display in /admin/structure/blocks. Now go to views and edit uc_catalog view. Check that you’re editing the Grid display, not table. Click on contextual filters and edit Content: Has taxonomy term ID (with depth). My working configuration:

1. Depth 0
2. Set the breadcrumb for the term parents is checked 
3. When the filter value is NOT in the url: Display contents of “No results found” and the exception box has “all” as value (override title unchecked) 
4. When the filter value Is in the url or a default filter is provided – override title is checked with the value “%1”, override breadcrumb is not checked, specify validation criteria is checked, “taxonomy term” is chosen as the validator, “Term ID” is chosen for Filter Value Type 
5. All the other options are unchecked.

That should handle the breadcrumbs and urls. To also get proper redirection from catalog taxonomy terms, edit another view – uc_catalog_terms. Click to edit the “Taxonomy term: Name” field. There go to rewrite results and output this field as link. Insert [name_1]/[name] as the Link path (those are two tokens, the first is the name of the vocabulary, derived from a field that’s excluded from display, the second is the name of the current taxonomy term, from the current field). Ensure also that replace spaces with dashes is checked and change transform the case to “lower case”, that’s for SSL reasons (should you want to provide SSL for the catalog pages). If you are using drupal in a language other than English, as I do, go with the transliteration module to redirect links.

All your links should have proper semantic urls based on taxonomy AND lead to the proper catalog pages (if you followed both solutions #1 and #2).

Well, I hope I managed to help at least some of you struggling with Ubercart. Except for some issues, the module is really good and I recommend using it. My next small tutorial will help setting up SSL to work correctly with Ubercart in mix http/https mode.

Catch me twitter @trewebs, facebook (www.facebook.com/trewebs) and #drupal on freenode IRC (here under the nickname wiherek).

I feel I could maybe take on more personal subjects here – all in all, this is my blog :) So currently sitting in front of the computer at 3 am, just forced myself to stop working on the current project. There really is no reason to work at this time, unless you’re doing a grave shift.

I was browsing through some calls for tenders recently and found some difficult / interesting ones. There was a call for building a site with VoD and LIVE stream, for commercial tuition in some kind of business management classes. I found that it wouldn’t even be that hard to implement, because of Drupal videowhisper support. That looks just so cool. While doing research for that, I also learned about youtube’s currently-beta project, youtube rentals. Don’t feel like searching any further for VoD. Anyway. Next tender. What’s needed is an online spreadsheet with excel-like functionality and compatibility. First google query for drupal spreadsheet. Result was sheetnode. Excel, Open Office, Google Docs compatibility. It looks quite nice, and it allows for interaction between various spreadsheets in different nodes. That’s just awesome. I’m not writing that just to be excited about something I just saw – that module convinced me to take part in that call for tenders. 

Currently, I’m doing a ubercart webstore. It’s almost done, however it doesn’t have very much content yet. Still pretty buggy – it’s a long way from finding the right module to actually implementing a functional product. See if you can spot some bugs: www.fabryka-prezentow.com.pl. Yea… I’m looking for a better domain ;) please tell me if you go bugspotting.

But I just wanted to drop here for a short while. Give a little update. It snows in Poland now. Need to update trewebs.com, too -> I’ve grown tired of the uninformative cases part of this portfolio. But it isn’t a major focus now. Got enough projects to keep me occupied. That’s still work though, and it was supposed to be a bit more personal. Ok. My better half is in her ninth month now, our son is due in about two weeks! That was probably the only thing I wanted to write about really, it just makes me very happy.

Recently I've been really busy with the project www.eldat.pl. It's quite similar to one of my former projects layout-wise, but really different in the back-end. I was pushing it to get some Drupal magic working. The functionality and automatic SEO achieved by module cooperation is quite cool. An example: using Taxonomy + Pathauto + Global Redirect + Search 404 together. When a user lands on a page that doesn't exist @ eldat.pl, a search is automatically processed that includes the automatically created semantic paths of all articles on the site.

However, I also mean layout functionality. When you take a look at one of the products on the site, you'll see that detailed information is arranged into groups with horizontal tabs. That would take a great deal of work with HTML / CSS or maybe less with jQuery UI. But it only takes a few drag and drop mouse moves with the Field Group module. I only needed a few lines ( < 50, tbh) of CSS to style the rest of it, and not even touching the theme (template / skin).

I am already preparing for the next one. That will definietely be based on the awesome Omega theme with 960 grid system. I also intend to start using SASS. That one also has Drupal interaction, but I haven't thought about it enough yet. All in all, I feel that I am enjoying working with Drupal more and more. I also feel that I am just scratching the top of an iceberg.

Speaking of ice, there's this other thing: we have Christmas now (Merry Christmas, everyone!). It wasn't the rainy weather in Warsaw nor the shopping spree that got me into the mood though. I was ought to get it sooner or later, but didn't expect that typing 'let it snow' into Google would trigger the magic. See you all in 2012!