Fusion Drupal Themes by TopNotchThemes

Greg — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:32:39 +0000

GVS partnered with TopNotchThemes team (a support client) and 3281d Consulting to build TNT's flagship e-commerce site, FusionDrupalThemes.com.

FusionDrupalThemes.com offers free and premium Drupal themes, as well as yearly Fusion Pro support subscriptions. The site makes extensive use of Ubercart and Panels to create these features:

Dashboards for site users, showing their forum posts, subscriptions, purchases, etc.
Streamlined checkout process focused on improving conversion rates.
An automated theme packaging system built by 3281d.
An on-site customer ticket system with complex privacy functionality.

Notable pieces of Drupal functionality built with the GVS team include:

Custom Panels panes that allow site builders to customize product and user profile pages without writing code.
A customized documentation system that combines ApacheSolr weighting and faceting for automated content presentation, along with the Nodequeue and Smartqueue Taxonomy modules for a more customized .
Performance tuning and optimization.
Customized discount rules made possible by enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.
Node access wrangling.

The Fusion site has a complex combination of node access requirements, including:

Premium subscriber-only support forums.
Certain users can mark their posts as 'private' to themselves and administrators.
File downloads accessible only by users who have purchased it.

Drupal site builders know that getting multiple node access modules to work together, especially on the same content type, can be tricky. The Fusion site successfully combines the following node access modules:

Private
Organic Groups
Forum Access
ACL
access_private

For more implementation details, read the excellent FusionDrupalThemes.com case study on Drupal.org.

visit the site

Lollishops

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:28:06 +0000

We helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing we did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. We posted a summary of our research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so we set to work building a new module.

The result is the User Quota module. Currently the module is very simple. It provides two administrative screens: 1 to list all of the users with their current quotas and a second to manage the quota for a specific user.

Why bother announcing it here? To limit confusion in an already crowded area I used the project page from an old module. Doug Muth graciously agreed to let us use the old User Quota project page. Thanks, Doug!

Feature Enhancement - Easy Quota Purchases

One sad point with this module is that the Paypal integration we did for Lollishops was very site specific and cannot be directly committed and used on other sites. We are looking for sponsors to help build a simple e-commerce integration. We are debating about whether to integrate with Ubercart, or LM Paypal, or Simple Paypal Framework. Certainly in time it should provide both of these features. The real question is which to do first. Ubercart appears to have the most solid 6.x release but doesn't fit with the lightweight nature of the module.