Saturday 1 October 2011

Mid 2011: First look at Drupal Commerce. Where are the instructions?

I downloaded and installed Drupal Commerce when it was still in Beta: that's how cool I am when it comes to bragging but not when it comes to results. The gap between me and results is an instruction book, and I see on Amazon that nobody has dared write one yet.

Why?

Products and Views are different in Commerce. Or something more accurately stated along the same lines. OK I get the general idea but anyone on a video or writing an explanation of Drupal Commerce seems to get stuck on this point and not state how to cope with it. A bit as though Sea France staff stood at the harbour and said "the thing you have to realise is that there is a water-filled channel to cross between the UK and France and that is what makes a ferry company so good compared to other forms of transport". Sea France are a bit like that in real life. Book a ticket. No ship. When you get a ship it is really good if you bring your own loo paper but they are a nationalised industry, not a staff owned company, and solving problems is not their job. If you want cheap tickets on ferries, why not open an account at a cashback site first? For effect, I will pretend not to be biassed by the chance of a tiny referral payment. Once on the cashback site the deal is from Ferrycheap, although there might be better offers on other parts of the net. The salads on Sea France ships are good.

A difference between nationalised ferry companies and open source software companies is that people like the software companies.Which is odd because buying a ship and doing the human resources and payroll and acounts would take a lot of paperwork I think, while software should be a bit easier, but people like software companies so much they go to events in London (Croyden) and clap. A few hundred quid to go to Drupal London, then more to see Drupal Commerce. Surely nobody who pays for their own ticket would go to such a thing. Stranger still, in video-speeches that are online, people clap when something good is said about Commerce. All the people who front the show look intelligent, industrious, self-critical, and even nice to meet but I don't usually clap when such a person gives a lecture about something you hoped-for like a ship that is not quie available. Maybe there are Apple users in the crowd who think the whole world works like Apple with wierd gushing enthusiasm and not a lot of criticism. Maybe it's because the USA never had the First World War to such a big extent that there are so many non-cynical people there. Good luck to them.

Another way of looking at it is that not enough people say "thank you" to producers in other industries; we are too used to getting it all from China. Maybe people really do clap when a Sea France ferry arrives on time, but people don't appreciate local producers who are offering a fair price but can't pay for advertising as the china import corporations can, even though they pay their taxes employ our offspring and in good years might respond to local demand. I hope to release a thing called a Blackspot T Shirt onto the market soon via Crowdfunder.co.uk - watch this space.

Note to self: "The Source is invalid. Cannot connect to the database. The Source is invalid. Cannot connect to the database. Unable to connect to any of the sepcified MySQL hosts".

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