Drupal Developers for Content-Rich Online Stores

Magento integration would provide a perfect blend of powerful, flexible eCommerce and great community and content management. Offering features such as one-page checkout, guest checkout, multiple address shipping, many shipping and pay portal options. Drupal sites could take eCommerce to a whole new level, while offering much better content management.

Drupal Content Management System (CMS) provides unique abilities to build present and manage the content of the web-site. Magento is the best open source e-commerce platform in the world, which gives the user an exhaustive set of features. Drupal-Magento is a set of modules that bring Magento functionality into Drupal.

Drupal has a solid community. There is the CCK module to quickly add additional fields to a content type and make it available to the content producing team. Content versioning, workflow and so on, is easy in Drupal.

The goal is to combine the strengths of both platforms providing user a powerful e-commerce platform with a front-end that can be easily themed and managed.

Drupal-Magento modules provide:

•    Synchronization of Magento products to Drupal 

•    Custom product options

•    Up-sells, cross-sells, linked products

•    Synchronization of Magento categories into Drupal taxonomies

•    Synchronization of Drupal users to Magento customers, synchronization of addresses

•    Synchronization of currencies and currency conversion rates

•    Stock management

•    Full-featured shopping cart

•    Fully theme-able and customizable checkout process

•    Coupon codes

•    Payment modes API

•    Shipping methods API

The modules have several features and provide an API that allows Drupal developers to hook into the process of synchronization or write modules to synchronize data. This module requires a Magento extension. Consult drupal developer, drupal developers, drupal programmer, drupal programmers, drupal development, drupal expert.

The Drupal-as-the-main-component implementation is based on synchronizing Magento products, categories, orders and so on into Drupal.

Although this gives flexibility, it may be complex to implement. Magento frontend functionality needs to be rewritten for Drupal. Magento would then only be an e-commerce backend accessible via Web services. You would be able to use Drupal modules and flexible templates, achieve much better performance and so on.

It is a decision to make whether the site is more about content or about commerce.

The straightforward solution is to integrate on the service layer. Whenever you are on the e-shop product page, you call a Drupal service to bring related content, say, blog posts. It is so also with category pages.

There are some challenges, though. Whenever you add a CCK field or a feature like rating to a content type, you need to modify the layout and write templates for data coming in from Drupal.

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A more complex path to take is to integrate the Drupal rendering engine into Magento: a tightly coupled architecture. It may make sense when using many Drupal features.

Adapted from ‘Magento and Drupal Integration’ (Evaldas Taroza, Nov. 11, 2009)

Drupal has a solid community. There is the CCK module to quickly add additional fields to a content type and make it available to the content producing team. Content versioning, workflow and so on, is easy in Drupal.

Consult Drupal Developer, Drupal Developers, Drupal Programmer, Drupal Programmers, Drupal Development, Drupal Expert.

Using both Magento and Drupal as the main components is reasonable when the content will be displayed on the Drupal site and e-shop on the Magento site. If a product has a blog post attached, you’ll have a link on the product page, clicking which open a Drupal page with the blog post.

A challenge here is to maintain two different themes so as not to harm user experience. When the customer clicks on the blog link inside the product page, the blog is displayed with the same look and feel as the shop. Another challenge would be the ability to mix content with product information on the same page.

It may make sense, however, to take this path when there are only some of the things to be shared between both components, say, users, and everything else is completely separate, say, when a company has an e-commerce site, a customer community site, and a corporate site.