In this post I am going to look at Drupal Commerce and demonstrate how to prepare e-commerce product data for import into Drupal Commerce - and show how to create a delimited list of product references to link the products to their display nodes. These techniques supplement the wealth of great practical demos and documentation provided by the Commerce team.

Kambara has just launched a new website design for Burton Kia at www.burtonkia.co.uk.

We were engaged by the History of Parliament Trust to work on their flagship website that publishes the results of research into the members and constituencies of all British parliaments since 1386.

See for yourself at : http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org

This data rich web site is managed by the Drupal CMS and has tens of thousands of 'nodes'.

Finally solved a curious issue that has been nagging me on a test Drupal commerce site.
I have a utility script that lists products that are not linked to Product Displays (handy). Perplexingly the ‘report’ kept showing some orphaned products even though I had linked them all and the report had shown none previously.
It is a test site undergoing some heavy development so at first I put it down to that - rolling the database back and forth etc But today I noticed it and was pretty sure that nothing had changed that could cause such data changes. Could it be some bug in entity API, commerce ? Unlikely! So crack out the deer stalker and pipe lets investigate!

Below are my notes taken as I investigate techniques to achieve my Objective,
(This post is not a normalised set of instructions but the process I went through to figure out the best way to handle multiple currencies c objective)
if I get a chance ill create another post with a normalised set of instructions/explanation.

Objective

Getting your page title and metatags correct is great for SEO and enables your readers to locate your content by getting it indexed well.
In this post we'll see how to get your modules and theme to play nicley together to ensure that your page structure is optimal for web standards and indexing. In most cases this can be sorted with a simple fix.

You may have noticed if you have looked at the page source of Drupal sites that they often have two content type metatags

This is a remnant of a security fix to ensure that the page always had a content type. (you can read all about it here http://drupal.org/node/451304

If you use the Ubercart module suite for Drupal to create e-commerce sites (we do and love it!) then one of the things you may wish to do is to change the default 'cart' to 'basket' - for a non-US audience. There is no setting in the Ubercart modules to enable this - but it is really easy and here's how to do it.
Get the excellant string overrides module and install it. Then set it up to swap the following fields:

Original - Replacement

Drupal is great and the taxonomy system is great - but large taxonomies (over 1,000 terms are a headache for any system) and Drupal is no different. I have a new taxonomy for a project with > 5k terms in a three deep hierarchy and using it presents some usability, performance and other issues.
So I though I would take a break and write a bit about evaluating some Drupal contributed modules for working with large taxonomies:

A general housekeeping task for CMS systems such as Wordpress and Drupal and other websites and good practice to keep your site SEO high is to make sure you are gracefully handling missing pages (404 errors).
One of the routine tasks to carryout is checking for crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools. If you see any missing pages in the list it is worth making sure you have some measures in place to handle these and ideally issue a 301 redirect so that Google and other search engines update their indexes.