The setup

We focused on making it only with out-of-the-box stuff, restricting ourselves to the features and functionality that exist within the Drupal Commerce ecosystem itself. No custom code or modifications other than normal theming. That's right: Using only what's available out there now, we came up with a pretty amazing ecommerce site, if we do say so ourselves.

One caveat: we did make a custom theme for the demo, which you'll probably want to do anyway. There are the default Drupal themes, but most people are going to want to create a custom one. But that's a relatively simple task for a front-end developer; you don't need a back-end developer as well.

All the other setups can be done through the basic Drupal UI point-and-click configuration. If you're somewhat savvy with configuring Drupal, you can do it all yourself in a very short time, and produce a truly phenomenal site.

Sometimes, you need some guidance.

Many people wonder how it could possibly be so easy. We've been getting a lot of questions like, "How did you build this big amazing catalogue?" And the truth is we didn't actually do that much. We just enabled and configured the functionality that was already available. Drupal has this great Search API (and associated modules, Solr and Facets) that lets you do a ton of search customizations for anything that's stored in Drupal (blog articles, users, products, whatever), so all you have to do is tweak the configurations, and you get this amazing catalogue.

It's not that hard, but it's not that intuitive either; you just need a little guidance and direction. Sometimes, just seeing an example is enough to make you realize how easy it can be. And that's exactly what the demo provides. It features a checkout, tax configurations, some shipping options, and even a sample payment system. You can click around and check it out without fear of breaking things; the database resets every night.

When you go to the demo site initially, a popup is presented with a bunch of guided tours, but you are, of course, free to ignore that and just play around with it yourself. We're also releasing a bunch of tutorial videos to help you. We also have a resources page that shows a lot of the different features you can check out.

Plus, all the source code for the demo, including the custom theme, is available on GitHub. Within the repo is a full database dump so you can set up the entire thing yourself locally (see the README.md). AND one of the Commerce module maintainers, Bojan Živanović, is taking some of the content and configuration from the demo and turning it into an installable demo store module.

It's seriously awesome. Check it out!

Chat with us

If you'd like a personalized tour to discuss how Drupal Commerce fits into your omnichannel solution, give us a shout. We're happy to show and tell.