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I recently had to create a slideshow for a special project. What's so special about that you say. Indeed, everywhere you look you see slideshows. If there's one thing that's common to 99% of all websites today it's a slideshow. Almost boring. That is until you actually decide to implement one. There must be 50 ways to slide your images - and I don't mean the transition effects. There's a page with extensive documentation just for that (see References in the sidebar). Picking and choosing the right module and library is almost a burden.

There are various scenarios where you would want to display a slideshow. The most common is the home page. I've used the venerable Views Slideshow module (2007) in the past for this purpose. It's simple enough to implement and is available for D7, D8 as well as Backdrop.

In this day and age where Drupal 8 is all the rage and while contemplating an end-of-life Drupal 6 Ubercart Store upgrade to Drupal 7 or 8, I wondered if Ubercart was still a relevant alternative? Because if it was, then Ubercart 6.x store owners wishing to upgrade would not have just one but two options to choose from, two chances to find the right fit.

My initial thought was, let's go with the flow and migrate to Drupal Commerce. The main reason behind my sheepish logic: Commerce is the de facto go-to e-commerce platform.

Then, another side of me argued that Commerce's dominance is somewhat artificial and really stems from the fact that commerce-talk dominates the techno buzz channels, grabbing most of the spotlight and in so doing is casting other potential solutions in the gloomy shadows of quasi-oblivion...

In this article, I will share my experience about a recent project for a small town hockey association which, for the past 5 years, has been relying on a Drupal 6 Ubercart 2.x website to automate seasonal registrations for its 350 hockey players. With Drupal 6 now defunct (EOL) and no security team* to provide the required assurance that credit card transactions would be safe, there was little choice but to upgrade at least to Drupal 7 before registration could start.

In this tutorial or guide, I will share the best solutions I found for two basic Drupal Commerce use-cases and delve into their respective setup.

Commerce Kickstart 2 (CK2) is a great distribution for setting up an online store; it packs a lot of goodies out-of-the-box. But it can't have them all. Printing an order to PDF is not included. So one has to do some R&D for that.

In this brief tutorial I will show you how to setup and configure Mailchimp for a multilingual Drupal 7 website and succeed in translating the Signup form field labels.

Sometimes, I find that working with Drupal requires a strict recipe-like approach in order to reach the desired outcome - and perhaps avoid going insane. In other words, the order in which you perform each step is important.

When you set out to make banana bread, it is not sufficient to know that you need 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup of butter, 1 cup of milk and, of course, 2 blackened bananas. If you mix the ingredients in the current order, your likely to run into trouble. Knowing a thing or two about basic cooking will help you come up with the appropriate workflow that will have your friends and colleagues raving about your banana bread.

The following guide was used in a presentation at DrupalCamp Montreal 2014. The presentation focused on how to install Drupal Commerce from scratch (i.e. without the Commerce Kickstart distribution). This is an elevator guide. So get in now because we're going up!

FIRST FLOOR

101. https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce
102. Install & enable required modules
     • drush dl ctools views entity rules addressfield commerce
     • drush en ctools views entity rules addressfield commerce -y

This may well qualify as a Drupal cheap trick. But it is pretty darn useful if you ask me. The use case - I have a custom content type for daycares. In it, daycare owners can advertize the number of available spaces they have at any time. Creating a list of daycares showing available spaces is, of course, easy with Views. But what if I would like to show the total number of available spaces for the listed daycares. How would I do that? At first, it's not obvious. But after the usual searching spree, I found the perfect solution.

I thought this would be an easy one. Not so. What works in Drupal 6 doesn't necessarrily work in Drupal 7. Let's take a simple example. How about a script that allows you to show/hide one or more paragraphs. I did a quick Google search and found numerous examples.

This is part 2 of Uberdrupal: from distribution to profile.

In Part I of this post, I wrote about the context that led me investigate ways to speedup the installation of various Drupal websites.

Just as you might grab a napkin to sketch out an idea in your favorite joint or reach out for a pad of paper to test a concept with fellow developers at work, one often needs a fresh Drupal code-base (a Drupal napkin) to test and validate ideas. Practice makes perfect. If only installing a fresh Drupal code-base was as easy as grabbing a paper napkin under the glassy gaze of a disillusioned waitress... Actually, piece of cake! As we will soon see. Sort of.

I've been experimenting with installation profiles for some time now. It all started with a Drupalcon Chicago presentation by Dmitri Gaskin (dmitrig01): From Zero to Distribution using Features, Profiler, and Drush Make. A year ago, on a bad day, setting up a fresh Drupal installation in order to test a module or try some new tricks in Views could take me as much as two hours. The possibility of installing Drupal with a custom list of contrib modules in less than a minute seemed like science-fiction at the time.

Most coders are familiar with Drush Make. So I'll skip that part for now. Suffice to say that a .make file is a list of projects, modules, features and even profiles that will be fetched and installed when you use the drush make yourMakefile.make pathToDir command.