I am building online shop and Omega is working a treat for the front end as there are lots of lovely zones and regions in which to place blocks of products, but now I'm getting around to individual product pages, things are slowing a lot.
I first took a look at Drupal Commerce, but having wrestled with it for a few hours, I can confirm that it is still a developers playground, pretty buggy and certainly not suitable at this stage for my purposes. So I have now set up Ubercart 7.x-3.0-beta3 and it seems stable enough to use.
I now need to change the layout of the product pages and had hopped I would be able to achieve everything I wanted to do with Omega and css. I don't need much, just to be able to move images around, relocate and duplicate 'add to cart' button. I thought this would be basic stuff!
I read however this process seems to be largely based around php and modifying tpl files. In short in find myself in completely new territory, with no compass and no real understanding of what to do.
The Ubercart microsite seems to have plenty if information, but most of it from what I can see was written for Drupal 6 and Ubercart 2, neither of which I am familiar with. In some of the new threads there is mention of using the contemplate module. Would this help? What does it do?
So, if anybody has a few minutes to spare, would they mind pointing me in the right direction. I ask this with particular reference to Omega of course, as it is the only theme I know or for that matter, ever intend to use.
Thanks.
Paul Driver
Comments
Hi Paul! Have you looked into
Hi Paul! Have you looked into using Delta and context? This is very powerful in that it allows you to create subthemes and thus move regions etc. around based on content type. I would look there first to move things around as it's saved me a lot of time trying to customize ways of doing things.
Drupaler and Mobile Ninja
Cellar Door Media - Beautiful Mobile Solutions
thanks for the tips
Hi Cellar Door and thank you for your suggestions.
Yes I am familiar with both Delta and Context as I've been with Omega for a few months now:-)
Unless I've missed something, Omega does not provide the same grid style control within individual regions, but rather for regions within zones.
The problem with Ubercart, or should I say, the Ubercart product pages in particular, is that they dump everything into the main content region (css = body). This is to say, the product description, the images, the add to cart buttons, together with any supplimentary data fields are all stacked on top of each other in the main content area.
Now you would think that with a bit of css it would be easily possible to sort this out. Not so easy as far as I can work out.
With Ubercart, by default the add to cart button appears above the product description, which appears above the images and then in turn, any additional attributes (size or color for example). I want the photos to appear to the left of my description, with any attributes beneath. The main content area represents just one Omega region, yet I need to position perhaps a dozen different data fields using css within this one region. I should say that I struggle with css at the best of times, although I am getting the hang of it.
I spent a lot of time working with floats but this didn't seem to work out. So as a workaround I applied css to the directly to the body field, to make it 280 pixels from the left margin (equal to 5 columns in a 16 column grid) allowing my images to sit to the left, only to find that this change would effect the body field site wide, not just on the product pages.
I ended up having to create a new product description field (sidestepping the body field) using the field API, so that I could apply ccs just to the new product description and not the body field elsewhere on the site.
Whilst I now have the product pages looking how I want, I am finding that other parts of Ubercart, which rely on views, are now broken because I am unable to use the body field. And I am also finding that other Omega components such as the footer zones are appearing beneath (in z-index terms) my content areas???
I'll figure it out for my current project. But my hope is that somebody with a bigger brain than I, will come along and write an Ubercart/Drupal Commerce module for Omega which make the styling of product pages somewhat easier. He says, hoping that some large brained coder types are listening in!
@MrPaulDriver
Paul, You're right, the
Paul,
You're right, the context and Delta will only help re-arrange the regions but not the blocks within on a grid basis. Have you looked at going to custom views for each of your products? I know that I have done this in the past and have been able to re-arrange their order and then style with CSS to some success. Ubercart does give most of the info out as fields you can use in views.
I do know one person on the chat channel that's working on an Ubercart Omega subtheme to use, their name is jerryitt. You'll maybe want to contact them on the IRC channel and discuss more in detail. He seems to be quite a way along in the process and could offer some good advice.
My only advice would be to try and use views to create blocks for the content as you could then use arguments in the URL along with context to style these blocks accordingly.
Good luck!
Drupaler and Mobile Ninja
Cellar Door Media - Beautiful Mobile Solutions
How very interesting
I shall be taking a closer look at views now
@MrPaulDriver
Display Suite
I accomplished what I need with display suite.
I've never used DS before but what powerful combination Omega and Display Suite are together.
Brilliant!
@MrPaulDriver