Drupal’s role in versatile application development and Ecommerce

Drupal built in 2000, released in 2001 has been known as a popular CMS. Drupal’s powerful customization tools make it a great content management system that can be set up to build a variety of websites, from blogs to community based and corporate websites. Presently, Drupal is hitting the E-business market alongside the portable application development support. Drupal is a very extensible web platform, and also provides APIs to build mobile applications. It is possible to develop a powerful RESTful Web Service API or a terrific mobile application using Drupal 7. Without spending much time and effort for understanding the intricacies of each mobile platform, nor learning diverse technologies like Objective C, Java, we can utilize our knowledge in Drupal to build a simple mobile app for selling products.

The main tools we need are

Drupal Commerce — To built the online store, Commerce module for Drupal can be utilised.

DrupalGap  —-  The portable application will be fueled by the DrupalGap module and SDK. A fully functional Ecommerce website with Drupal Commerce can be easily set up by creating a view of product list. Product content needs to be defined as a content type with required fields.

Commerce Stripe — This module integrates Stripe with Drupal Commerce payment and checkout feature. The module will also completely incorporate Stripe to Drupal Commerce as a tokenized payment gateway. Enable this module and a payment method after signing up with stripe.

Another significant part is setting up the DrupalGap Mobile Application Development Kit. The Ripple plugin (Google Chrome ) can be used for developing the mobile app.

The  3 main DrupalGap contributed modules needed are :

http://drupalgap.org/project/addressfield – This module defines a new field type to store international postal addresses, implementing a subset of the top-level address elements defined in the xNAL standard.

http://drupalgap.org/project/commerce  –  Drupal Commerce can be used to build eCommerce websites and applications of all sizes. It implements strict development standards and is influenced by the great features of Drupal 7 and major modules like Views and Rules.

http://drupalgap.org/project/commerce_drupalgap_stripe – This gives the Stripe payment gateway for Commerce inside a DrupalGap mobile application.

Enable these modules and create a product content type with necessary fields. By creating a json view, we can show a product list. Next step is to create a page in the app to display the list. The orders can be viewed after adding the products to cart. ‘Build a Mobile App to Sell Products with Drupal’ describes how to create a website and mobile application to sell physical products. Refer this http://tylerfrankenstein.com/code/build-mobile-app-sell-products-with-drupal for a better explanation and demo for the same.

Utilizing Drupal’s Distribution idea, site features and functions for a particular sort of website as a single download containing Drupal core components, themes, contributed modules, and pre-built configuration could be easily accomplished. A distribution in Drupal is fundamentally an arrangement of modules, themes, and configurations all packed into a single installation profile released for a specific purpose, such as ecommerce or a community. Commerce Kickstart is a fine example of a distribution. In this manner, Drupal offers us to settle on a vital choice on building up a site with Ecommerce integrated in it or develop a mobile application prepared to deal with all sort of gadgets.

Drupal @ Cubet

At Cubet, we have a dedicated team for Drupal development, who has experience in handling Drupal based corporate web platforms and are equipped to take up eloquent challenges in Drupal development.

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