Wrestling with an error message on a Drupal Commerce site today. I kept getting errors relating to a missing template file with no path and no file name .tpl.php. Fortunatley with a little debugging giving me a pointer to the correct issue queue on Drupal the solution was readily available. So here's a few easy steps to follow in case you have the same issue.

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

A client needed implementing a custom teaser/short description for a CCK field (not the body) in his Drupal 6 site. The requirements: if the short description/ teaser is available use it otherwise get the data from the CCK field. It is important to note that Display Suite Drupal module was not available as I think it provides a much better approach (will post about in the future).

I have used the Views Custom Field module , this adds a PHP field that allows us to add PHP code to a view.

Drupal nodes typically have an Edit and View links (rendered as tabs at the top of the node by most themes).
 
Ever wanted to add you own links so you can add custom functionality?
This can be used to automatically populate node data.

The below example will show you how to add a link titled “reviewed” to an article node type, this link will prompt the user for a comment and set two cck field “reviewed” and “note”.

This is not intended as a real example but as an illustration of the how the following techniques can be used as the bases for the creation of powerful work flow.
The techniques covered are
•    hooking into the Drupal menu routing system
•    form creation and validation
•    node manipulation (node_load and node_save)
•    url redirect
 

- Talk notes from the BAD Monday meetup

By Guy Shneerson of Blue-Bag Ltd (www.blue-bag.com)    Guy@blue-bag.com

Notes form my presentation at the Brighton Area Drupal meetup (BAD monday) on Monday 18/04/2011 at the Skiff

Thanks to Steve for organising the evening and to all that attended

You'll notice that we are using the excellent 960 Robots Drupal theme for this blog. We aim to showcase several contributed modules and themes over time to show how they can be setup and used etc - using this site as a basis for video casts - in case you were wondering why we don't use our own themes... ; )
Great theme and easy to set up with great features out of the box.
One of the features of this theme is the random tweets in the header. Nice example of how to pull an external sites API query into your site - in this case Twitter.