On the Inside

Check out this news post for a few more details:

http://www.ubercart.org/news/oct-09-2007/vote_ubercart_coolsw

Basically, Intel made a Digg-like site for cool software projects, and I firmly believe that's Ubercart. I'd love it if everyone here would go take a moment to register and vote us up to the top of the list.

Go Ubercart, go!

Click here to vote!

Well... and now I post.

I've been dealing with rebuilding the Ubercart site for the last week at work. Unfortunately, we had an embarrassing backup solution (read, none) that led to us losing our website's database when our RAID system went yonkers. This means all our forum posts, contributions, live site listings, documentation, users, etc... the whole shebang... went the way of the dodo. This has given me a good opportunity to rebuild everything "in the know" so to speak. I've been able to avoid some of the failures of our previous systems with the benefit of a year's worth of hindsight. So it has been all bad... just mostly.

Oh! I finally got a closing date. This means I'll be moving into 528 Camp St. early next week before heading down to Greenville, SC for the wedding. Talk about cutting it close... closing on the house not even a week before getting married! But at least I'll have a house to bring my lovely bride to be home to (even if our bed won't have any sheets and the shower curtain won't be up!). I formally invite you all to come help with the moving and sprucing up of the property.

Finally, this evening I was reading the gift I got one of my groomsmen. (I hope he'll be alright with a slightly used copy of The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.) It's sort of a collection of apologetics outlines by McDowell that touches on any and every subject you might want to read about. Well, I started by reading an essay included in it by C.S. Lewis which was stellar. Feeling like I was cheating a little I turned to a chapter written by McDowell and read a bit about defenses for the deity of Christ... and I realized it was an approach I'd never read before. I found it to be quite encouraging!

Woohoo! I finally rolled out the initial release of Ubercart today. It took a few extra hours after everyone had gone home and the phones stopped ringing for me to finalize everything, but it's up! It's wonderful to be at this first milestone in development... It's taken us 6 months of development (with vacations and many sales calls in the mix) to get this out the door, but we've finally arrived.

Now, I am tired. And my butt hurts from sitting at my desk from 8 AM to 8 PM. (To be fair, I did have an hour break to head to Fazoli's for some lunch and a bit of reading in this week's Time and Children of Dune.) I look forward to a pleasant little conversation with my fiancee and a night of sweet, ubercartish dreams.

http://www.ubercart.org/news/mar-19-2007/initial_ubercart_release

I recently revamped the front page look at Ubercart.org in preparation for an eventual (hopefully sooner rather than later) first release. In the process, I learned once again that all the wonderful contributors have made Drupal an excellent tool for designing web pages. With a simple combination of Panels, Views, and Drupal's own content type creation, I was able to achieve what you see there with no headache whatsoever. It was just too easy!

What isn't necessarily easy is knowing the tools exist to do something like that and how to use them together for your site. I decided to spend some time writing up my experience, including the preliminary thought processes and then actual configuration of the modules, so others could benefit from my fun. The voice in the tutorial is pretty informal, but I trust it gets the job done. Also, I'm just darn proud of the end result and thought I'd put this up to get some feedback while helping people, too.

Purpose: Describe the thought processes and modules used to design the front page of Ubercart.org, a site designed to be both an information portal and user/developer community.

Modules explained: Drupal's own content type creation, Views, and Panels.

Honorable mentions: Deciding on what to display, visual aids, "enhancing" the forums and Navigation menu.

Well, the goal of this article is to explain to you how I constructed the front page at http://www.ubercart.org using some awesome contributed modules, a little bit of HTML, and some great free icons. We're preparing the place to be a community site, and a straight list of recent nodes just wouldn't cut it. I also didn't want to settle for a simple node that I update with new information every so often, so I finally got around to downloading the latest versions of the Panels and Views modules and set to work.