Ubercart NZ Bank Transfer at Checkout

Here in New Zealand paying by bank transfer is totally normal. Its what we do. I dunno what its like over the rest of the world but here almost anything can be paid for with bank transfer and its great coz it means you don’t have to have a credit card to buy online.

I wanted to have this on my website but it wasn’t in the modules that come with Ubercart so I had to go looking for it.

Once I again I found my answer in the Ubercart forums. That place is great!

I downloaded another module from drupal.org called Bank Transfer Ubercart Payment. There is a ‘Read Me’ which explains what to do to get it to work. It looks a bit confusing but if you read it slowly line by line and don’t move to the next line till you have done what the previous line asks then it shouldn’t be too bad.

All it does is add the option to pay by bank transfer and then adds an action where an invoice will be sent out with bank details on it.

When you see the money come into your bank account you can then go into Store Administration and into Orders and look at the order. You will see that the order is still awaiting payment coz no one has recorded a payment. What I do next is to manually record that the payment has been received and then deal with the order in the normal way.  Well.. I would if I had needed to yet but no one has used it  😦

Anyways its pretty cool.

Drupal & Ubercart Flat Rate Shipping – Problems and Solutions

22 Jan 2011 – just adding a couple of corrrections to this post

One of the biggest problems I have had with Ubercart has been to get a flat rate shipping cost that is added automatically to every order and that does not change whether 1 or 2 items are ordered.

(hmmmm, note to self – should I have it set so it increases after 2 items, so that the postage is higher for 3 or more items? – one for another day!)

What I wanted was a $6 postage charge to be added at the checkout. No shipping calculations and no problems if anyone forgets to click the button coz after all, if the postage is always a flat rate of $6 then there is no need to click the ‘calculate postage’ button.

My answer was very simple in the end but it took me ages to find it.

Here are the steps to go through –

Add your flat rate
Add a flat rate shipping method here admin/store/settings/quotes/methods/flatrate. I gave mine the title of New Zealand (this is what I see) and then the line item label of NZ flat rate (this is what people see at the checkout and means that later I should be able to add a rate for other countries too – but one thing at a time!)

I gave mine a base price and default shipping rate of $6. (By the way I went to the post shop first and checked how much it would be to send a t-shirt within New Zealand and there is a pre-paid envelope that would actually take 2 t-shirts and its the same price no matter what the weight is.  Thats why I want a flat rate.)

Correction – only give a value to the base price and NOT default shipping rate if you want the flat rate to be one price for every order, no matter how many items. The base price is the shipping rate and the default shipping rate is an extra which is added on for each additional item. This can be overriden in the product settings as shown below. But if you do it correctly here then there is no need!

Check all configurations in the store
The next thing to do is to make sure that all the correct permissions are enabled and that the shipping quote module is correctly configured.

I will explain what I did, and in italics is how to get there, ie for me I put http://www.hardluck.co.nz/admin/store/etc…..

admin/store/settings/cart – make sure shipping quote is enabled in ‘cart panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/checkout – make sure calculate shipping costs is enabled in ‘checkout panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/orders – make sure that shipping quote is ticked in ‘order panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/cart/quotes/edit – tick the box for ‘prevent the customer from completing an order if the shipping quote is not selected’

admin/store/products – go into each product and scroll down to shipping settings, in here there is a box to enter the flat shipping rate to over-ride the default. We don’t want to do that BUT it says (in my one anyway) ‘Enter -1 to revert to the default value’

This is not right. When I entered ‘-1’ it just took $1 off every time I calculated shipping!  So in there I now enter ‘$0’ and it works fine.

This is no longer necessary

Get the shipping rate to calculate automatically
There is a wee piece of java script here that some amazing person has written, which when downloaded and saved into sites/all/modules (by uploading it with your FTP client – like Filezilla) will make sure the shipping costs button is pressed automatically. I found it by searching thru the Ubercart forums which is a really good place to look if you are having problems coz there are bound to be other people who have the same ones!

So here is a screenshot of part of my checkout and this was just after I added the address. I didn’t need to do anymore, its just added shipping on itself.

Test it thoroughly and have someone else test it too!
This is like THE MOST important step of all! I had my site offline for maintenance when I did this work to it and I tested it a few times myself offline. I then put it online and got my mum to test it too because if there is something that will go wrong she will find it!  I dunno how she does it but she can get even the simplest things wrong so I get her to check everything knowing that if she can work it then it must be ok.

I just thought tho that while it was online and she was testing then then theoretically someone else could have been on there too. I did have it checked by myself by that point and didn’t expect any visitors but I guess that could be a problem for some people. I wonder what other people do in this situation?  Do they work with their site offline?

The next thing I need to do is get my computer sorted so I can work with more than one offline site.

Images not showing up in Ubercart site – Problem solved!

So I have fixed the problem that the images would not appear in my store, which I have built using Ubercart – which is awesome! So easy to use!

Anyway – the solution was soooo simple.

All I had to do was to go into module preferences and turn off ‘imagemagick’ in ‘Image API’

This is all it took. Basically it was looking for Imagemagick when it could have been using the built in image viewer instead. It is now doing that and everything works perfectly!

The site is going really well at the moment and I really think it could actually be used as a shopping site in the future  🙂   I am also going to take a look at my parents website soon too, since they are the real reason I am learning all this stuff! I am grateful to them for that. I would never have got myself to learn these things if it weren’t for them. Don’t you just love family 😀

Aquia Prosper Theme – Visual

Just wanted to record the appearance of my theme at this point…

Header – As you can see, I have an image across the top and the primary links are below this. I like the simplicity of this.

Sidebars – To the left, in the ‘left sidebar’ I have the items available to buy in the store displayed in a list so visible on every page. (yes I know there are only 4 so far – need to create some more designs!)

Under the list of items is the shopping cart – this is only visible on pages which are directly related to the store.

There is no right sidebar at present, keeps it simple…

Main Content – This page is a store page and is displaying one of the designs. You can see that I have not been able to get the image of the t-shirt to show up. The image has been inserted using Ubercart and the theme. It is supported with the ImageCache module and the Views module. I really have to get my site online to see if that will fix it….

Had friends staying for the past week and have ignored my site completely – tut tut!  Better go do it now!!

Choosing a Theme in Drupal

So like I said in the last blog post I have now added Ubercart to my Site and I have started to get real excited coz I can see it in my mind and I can imagine how good it will be once it is finished. Its going to be a shop for hot-rod inspired t-shirt designs- it will be so awesome!

The only problem has been that I think I set myself too big a challenge with the theming.

I think that really there are so many themes out there made by people who know what they are doing that I would be a fool not to start by using one of these and making a site that way. As they are customiseable I wouldn’t have a site that looked like someone else’s, I could make it unique.

So I went for another theme hunt and I tried out a few and came up with Aquia Prosper as my favourite. Its set up for Ubercart already so it will work real well for what I want and also the colours are perfect as I would like to have a theme of black (or grey), white and red. Also its clean and clear and it seems to be really flexible.  It is based on the Fusion theme so I had to download that as well and also the module called Skinr as this is what is used for some of the flexibility with the appearance.

So far it is all going really well and I am super pleased with how it looks and works and I have even managed to get the banner (is that the correct term or is it just header?) at the top to look how I want it to by turning off the title and letting my image stand out. I uploaded a png image for this as it has no background and so I was able to use the grey background within the theme, by getting it to show thru. Its really cool to be able to do that and I am really happy with the result.

The problem I am having at the moment is that the images aren’t working as they should. I am not sure if this is because I have two image modules downloaded or if its something I have done. Thats the problem with not really knowing what I am doing – it is so great when its going well but when a problem comes along I can spend hours and hours trying to solve it and not knowing what to do. It has certainly used up a lot of time!!

What is happening is that the images I am adding in for the products are not showing anywhere. They do not show in the product description, or in the catalog or the cart. This is all set up and should work straight off with this theme so I am a bit confused as to why it isn’t. Its quite frustrating!

I have been looking on the internet and the problem appears like it may be something that a lot of people have and that many ppl can only get around it by having the site on a remote server (ie – on the actual internet) and not the local host (ie – on my computer at home) so I am going to upload, or at least I thought I would “just upload” but its proving to be more difficult than that…
—–

Thats me just back to add this note – all I needed to do was to ask the web hosting service for an upgrade to their premium service so I can get 100MB of disk space rather than just 10MB.

Ah so easy!!

Good Drupal Modules

OMG, I haven’t left the house in two days! I have got a lot done tho, it has been completely worth it.

I have got a site that seems to be doing what I want it to and I got it looking kinda sweet too! (By the way – I decided to use a more developed theme to help me get it to look good, I know that I wanted to do it on my own but it seemed so daft when there are such good themes out there!)

Here is a list of the modules that I have uploaded and why-

Actually before I do – just in case I didn’t explain properly before (and to help me understand it more) I better just explain what modules are. Basically the modules in drupal are the functions that it can perform, sort of. They are activated within the administration menu and then after that more menus will appear in the admin menu and the website will be able to do more stuff.

So for example one of the core modules that comes with drupal, is the ‘poll’ module which allows you to put a poll or question on the site and then people can vote. Also there is a module for user login and search. Like, all the things you want to have on the site will be a module. And a lot of these modules will be contributed modules which means that they are made by contributers, who then allow us all to use them. So they all fit with drupal but they have to be downloaded separately from the drupal.org site. The contributed ones can be really great and I think most people do use them.

I have downloaded the following so far –

Image – This is the first module I downloaded and I did this so that I can add images to my blog posts and pages in the site.  I have later downloaded another image module. (tho not sure if it was the right thing to do yet)

Image Cache – this is the other image module that I downloaded and I did this because on Learn by The Drop it was recommended and he did a video showing how to make an image gallery by using this module.  I have not managed to get this to work tho….  but thats another story.

Image Field and Image API are another two that I got to go with image cache. It seems to be quite normal for contributed modules to work together and so you have to download one or two at a time.

Mollom – this is a security module that will protect from spam.

Path Auto – I got this to help with naming the urls for the site so that they are nice names and not node/7 or whatever.

Wysiwig – This is a ‘what you see is what you get’ module that means that I can now write blog posts and make bold and italics and stuff without using code. Makes it easier I think.

IMCE – I am not really altogether certain about this one, I downloaded it while I was doing a video tutorial and I thought it had something to do with uploading photos within the wysiwig but I am not sure now as that part of it doesn’t seem to be working terrible well.

Google Analytics – I got this so that when the site is up and running I will be able to track it well and see how it is doing.

Views – This is the module that lets you make different views like galleries I think.

Token – To be honest I can’t remember why I got this one but I think it works with another one.

Skinr – I had to get this when I got my new theme.  More about that later

Lightbox2 – I think I got this for the Image cache module but as I said thats not working so good at the moment.

Filefield – I think this goes with Image Field.

Ubercart – wow this module is sooo amazing!!!  It is like a fully set up shop!  Everything is there all ready to be customised. There are catalogues for the products, product pages where all the info is filled in, upload images, delivery prices, checkout, different payment methods. And the whole thing has real good admin with it too for all the orders and the tracking and all that. Its going to be soooo awesome – My site already looks like a shop and I haven’t even really started yet!  I love this one so much!

So yeh – those are my modules and as you can see there are a few issues that I am having so I hope to have these ironed out over the next few days or weeks or whatever.

Feels good to have made some progress.