Sunday 27 November 2011


https://vimeo.com/24275526
First steps in Drupal Commerce video

Jumping ahead from installation, this is an informal lecture on how to link display nodes to product nodes in a manual first-steps kind of way. There's a box for it somewhere on the screen when you set-up the product display node. My result looked a bit like the Commerce Kickstart example - not something you could earn a living from yet - JR Transcriber

Transcript of "First Steps in Drupal Commerce" at Colerado 2011 (making a Drupal Commerce site from scratch)



18.08
So what we're going to do is we're just going to take a little bit of a look-around here on the Store menu and see what we find. The first thing that you think about when you think about a store is going to be the products that go in the store. So, if you come down here
18.38
to the second last option on the store menu then two columns across then you see that we have a list, of those products. Then we have the ability to have "product types" and we have an existing product type that we got installed for us by default, and then we have the ability to add products. And of course we have, just like we have with nodes, we have the ability to manage the display of those products, as we work with them.
18.47
Angie: So - these products are not nodes, like they were in Ubercart?
That is correct: they are not nodes.
Angie: And then the cart [inaudible] bundles?
19
I'm going to show you exactly: we're going to make one. We're going to make one and that's the very next thing we're going to do. Because that's like the very first hurdle of using Commerce, is like "What's a product?" and "What's a product display node?" So the very first thing we are going to do...
19.16
Well: first of all lets just take a look. Because we can take a product and manage the fields on it. Just like you would  do on a
19.27
Oh wow! etc...

19.50
What we would be going to - I bet that it does this again. I don't know what the deal would be going to something just like when you're managing fields on a node
20
- something like that:
seems to be part of the store menu labelled Product+ edit / manage fields (selcted) /Manage display
We can add new fields of the product, like size, like colour, and we'll do that in a miute (assuming that ... yeah we'll do that! I don't think we'll run out of time to do that)
20.18
You'll see it comes by default with  a title for the product, an image, a price, and a status. So we have all that by default.
20.33
And we're going to make a couple of products now. And so: we'll do that, and then, of course, on product we can manage the display as well. 
[click's the "Manage Display" tap on the top right after "Edit" and "Manage Fields"
So that's like pretty smart like [inaudible]
Angie - No idea
[inaudible and stuff until...]
21
This is actually Drupal 7.0 which I wouldn't normally do with a Drush make (pull that down) but next week... Next week it will be 7.1
21.11
So let's go ahead and add a product .
21.18
We'll just add a red T shirt.
So we will just do a red T shirt, and the
SKU is going to be RedTshirt, and the
Title is going to be Red T Shirt, and
21.30
I think I even have an image here that has a red T shirt in it, and
Hey! Look at that red shirt.
[Price box]
And: I think this one's going to be $9.99
21.49
And: if we add other fields here, which we will have in a little while, we would fill that out just as we would on a node - a  node-type bundle: the exact same thing.
22.00
Let's make a Blue Shirt
Angie: - Is the SKU something like a Node Title like a required field that's always there?
Um: I don't think that's required. I don't think so. I don't think it is because it's [inaudible].
This one's going to be $9.98. So.
22.30
We've saved that, and now we have: What we have are a list here [screen shows Products+ in white on dark and "list" "Product Types" as tabs. We are on "List"] and these two things. [two lllegible lines - probably about two T shirts]
22.45
Now: this is the administration screen for: Product. But look what we have here.
22.50
Thanks to some of our friends right here in this very room - this is a View!
So, not only can I change the administration screen in any way I want to...
23.00
....but it can display fields in any way that I have added, and I can have multiple administration screens.
This is NOT a private like "Oo yeah: Commerce presents this screen that you have to live with". This is a - you know: this can be a Views Cock Operations. Right now I could turn it into a VDO administration screen. So I won't go there because it's kind of distracting from it, but because this is Views, I can
[changes screen somehow]
go into the wonderfull new Views 3 screen which does some great things like popping up a nice little screen in front of us, instead of below the fold. Oh it is so, so sweet. Um: thank you very much. "Not just me". It really is just absolutely stupendous - it's a great User Interface improvement.
24.00
Views was always good But having this here: we can just configure it. So there we have the admin page and there we can just configure it.. Every list is presented. Remind me to stop-off and see you some time. Every list is presented, in the whole Commerce world, is a view. So that you can do that. Including the checkout pane, and everything else. So.
24.24
OK. So. Now Here we are [on the front page] and we should...
We don't have anything on our front page!
We had that list of products.
I'll go back to the ist of products.
Here it is and I can go and I can
-add new products and
-we can look at it.
But this is an admin interface, and the intent is not that your users would ever directly access product. That's not the intent here. I imagine that some people will figure-out a way to do that, but that is not the way that it is supposed to be done.
22.54
Person: So is there no equivelance to like the Node [inaudible]
So now we are going to make a node display.
25.00
Now we are going to make the Product Display Node, OK, to display these.
So what we are going to do is we are going to go in, and we're just going to go to Node Add
it beats me what he's doing in the blur here
and you see that we have a Product Display Node here. And we're going to say...
We're going to say Red Shirt, display node, something like that.
25.25
"Node? What would you name it, because you don't want the users to see 'node'?"
Yeah. No, I was doing this for you. OK,
25.38
And, you see here on the product list, we have to select the correct product.
We're going to select that product.
And now when I save this, my default presentation is here:
-I've got the picture,
-and I have the add-to-cart button.
25.56
And so the default presentation of the product using the product reference field is to have a - you know, a picture, with an add-to-cart button. There's many other ways that you can present it. You can present it as a SKU; you can do a lot of different things.
I'll just add it to a cart.
And let's go ahead and make the - er: [typing]
Let's go ahead and make the Blue Shirt reference node
26.26
"While you're doing that could you explain the philosophy there? Behind the separation of the setting-up a product entity template kind of thing and of the node that actually shows-up on the screen?"

Yeah. It was actually one of the greatest limitations of Ubercart  -  was that you could only display something one way. Like you couldn't have a product that was displayed fifteen different ways on your site.

"Examples of ways, like, you know: bloc versus a node, or..?"

No. No, I mean that you might be selling a red T shirt
- in the T shirt category of your site, and also
-selling it in the red category of your site. Or you might be
-selling it in a boutique site that only sells red T shirts.
And you might have a different: - a whole different node presentation, with your nodes having different fields, and all kinds of things, so it gives you an enourmous amount of capability.
You might have a mole site, that used the same products as your regular site, but you want to have different node types, to present. So it give you an enourmous amount of power there. Does that make sense?
27.34
Um: this is actually, um...
This: - Gives People A Lot Of Trouble.
So there's no question about it: this gives people trouble, so it takes some time for people to get used to that.
28.00
"inaudible inaudible lots of different fields that are just not displayed, including references to other things, it could be like if you are representing a book you can have a field representing 'author' and - bla bla bla... and then let them get thrown up by your product?"

Yes. Yes that's exactly right.
And you can present it a whole bunch of different ways.
You know lots of speciality sites don't just... you know if you go to  [inaudible] or something like that ... there's lots of speciality shops that are actually presenting things in context. Like here's the cool product and
-here's why it's cool, and
-here's my big write-up about it, and
-here's my... "customer reviews?" And here's my customer review that goes with it, and this is the customer that...
And that can be it's own node.
And like, a block can have a product reference


So, it's a very very powerfull - um: a very very powerfull situation.

But it does mean that you have to plan for both the
-addition & maintenance of the products, and the
-addition & maintenance of the product display nodes.
And they, you know, take different plans.
29
And the import which we'll do that at the Colorado Importing School: I doubt if that
[inaudible]
"...imports ... product display nodes ...  ?"
No.
And we're going to do that in a minute. That's a great question! But we're going to do that in a minute.

Yes. So you can have the right stuff in the right place and not be duplicating products to do so.
30
[inaudible "three years later" inaudible]
30.25
I want to point out to you. Here we've got this shopping cart bloc over here. Look at that.
It's a view. OK? So I can do anything to that. I can add - I can put a little thumbnail of the item on there. I could do anything I want with that view. I could go in there. And, I don't know whether it ... it probably won't actually want to do this but . You know, I could just add anything I want, right there! I could just fiddle with the View, and change how it works, because it's Views. It's just a great thing.

[jumping back to 20.26 after other subjects]
So there we've just added two products and two - this is just the bottom, straight-line version of setting up some products:
-we added two products, and
-we added two product display nodes, 
to point at them.
Is that - make sense? OK? How are we doing on that? OK.
That's not very hard.
And of course now we want to do -some more things!
31.31
Let me see if I've left things out of my presentation here.
Yes. I did leave a little bit of something out, so:
31.40
Every product is an entity of its own, and it can have fields on it.
So I think that's clear, and we're going to go add: we're going to go add fields to our product in a minute, OK.
Now one of the consequences of this is that every - every unique product, every permutation, is a unique product. Which means that: it's not like you have one product with, you know, red green & blue, and large medium & small on it.  You have: that's nine products. Nine products: OK? Nine products with the characteristics of those nine products. And we'll do that in a second.

But that's very important, and that's one of the things that people ask right away, that is key to that.
32.29
-Only admins go-in and look directly at products.
-Users look at them via product display nodes. OK.
And of course we've seen our wonderfull Views 3 there...
"so there's no concept of attributes or options on products?"
Yeah we're going to do that [inaudible] that's exactly what we're going to do now. Um: so - I'll show you how that works. OK?
32.53
So,

So here we are. We have this red shirt and this blue shirt, but we want to display them in a different way. We want a drop-down menu to choose small, medium and large, of red and blue. So let's do that. We're going to go into the product: we're going to go into the product type, and we're going to manage the fields on that. And we're going to add a - a size. And that's going to be a list. And we're just going to make a select list where we're just going to make some options. We're working on the product itself now because we're talking about how the product works.
EDIT TAB
PRODUCT SETTINGS
ALLOWED VALUES LIST
So this is going to be small, medium, and large.
34
We want just one value here. That's the allowed value. So that one's good.
[SAVE SETTINGS button at the bottom of the screen clicked]
And now lets add a colour field.
MANAGE FIELDS TAB
[inaudible / typing]
34.23
And this one will be: red, and green, and blue.
[types
redRed
greenGreen
blueBlue]
And [inaudible: clicks a button on the web page]
And here we go. We're not setting a default on it. Which of course we could.
And now our - and now: we're all set with that. So, let's go ahead and...
35
...go back to our products, and edit them!
Go to STORE and PRODUCTS, and: our blue shirt [screen headed Product BLUESHIRT].
We're going to make that one blue, and lets make the size small.
[choosing from drop down menus]
And, the red shirt... actually this works pretty slick! So I'm going to make this one red, and I'm going to make it medium. (And actually I hope the focus group finds it just as slick!).
And actually we only have these two products here so we should probably go back and add some more.
And now lets go over to our product reference node [where?].
And we need to change one thing on EDIT. Because, by default, the product reference was single-valued, and now we are going to make it multi-valued.  Because it can have... - it can point to more than one product now. So I am going to say that I can have an unlimited number in here.
36.17
So now, lets go-over and make yet another...
You know that I was saying that you can have more than one way to sell something. But it's the same thing.
...but we still have, um: we still have the blue node and the red node. They're still here. They still work. Everything is fine about them. But I want to make a new one! And this is going to me "small shirts".  [he's on a screen called CREATE PRODUCT DISPLAY]
And what we're going to do is we're going to select multiples that can be selected as options here.
37
I should have changed - I should have changed the SKU on these so that it said
[inaudible]
So now we have a cool shirts display node.
And you see: now we can switch between the blue shirt, and the red shirt.
And add-to-cart: this way.
And you'll notice that because there's not more than one kind of blue or red shirt, there's not an option for us to change the size. So let's go ahead and make a ...
37.38
Well, I mean: let me stop there before I run-on.
 I'm going to make a couple of more products, so that we can add them to this.
Did what we just did make sense? We did one node, now, that points to two products.
And therefore that it can automatically can present the right picture, and a select [drop down select button] the right picture. With magic Ajax switching - which is cool!

Did that all make sense? Do you want me to - er - back up on that? Any questions?

"Can you switch between two products that have different information? And by information I mean all the inputs have to be the same accross all products, like..."
13.20
Like say you put in a different colour of thumbnail [sized picture] - accidentally. Something like that you mean?

"Yes. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept but I was just wondering if there was a - like:
Like if one of the products has size selection but the other one only comes in medium or whatever. Will all that data change as well?"

That's why we're going to do that right now.  So that's what we're going to do. Any questions before we do that? I think I've answered your question.

"Actually I've just got one more. It's really a follow-on [question] but...
Is there a way to require selection of the attributes?
39
I think so. [inaudible]
There should be a check-box. [inaudible]

"I understand that if I have a shirt that comes in three colours, and three sizes, I have to define it nine times?"

Correct. That is absolutely correct. There will be nine products. That is absolutely correct.

"And I have to define each one of those individually".
39.25
And you don't do it by hand the way I'm doing it right now. You do it with Commerce Pains, or you do it with Commerce Migrate, or one of the others. There's Commerce Bulk Product Creation (which is actually not in working order right now). But it - you know [that this is pre-release]. So you don't actually do it. You don't actually do it the way I'm doing it because that would take a long time.

"That's what I was saying!"

And there's actually another couple of projects out there that I'm aware of that are intended to make that easier for you. OK?

"So you would, like,  upload a spreadsheet or something like that?"
40.00
Like: at the Denver - at the Drupal Camp in Colorado - I'm going to demonstrate how you would do that with
and actually I might succeed in showing you how you could to that after this session if you want to.  Bug there's actually a couple of bugs and weeds and actually it needs a couple of patches for it to work right. It's not all there for certain yet. So I decided to tweak the process to show you here.  But in that I can download a hundred products off of a feed and then download off the same feed and turn those into product reference nodes. And it all works. I won't say it isn't a little tweaky, but it will work. OK?
47.47
inaudible
41.00
Yes. And there are / there is more than one way to approach that. This is the way it works in [Drupal ]Commerce. So.
41.10
So we're going to add some more permutations. And see how this works.
So we're going to do to >>PRODUCTS and we're going to ADD - more product.
By the way: you see we have product types here?
? being a product type of a product doesn't doesn't mean that it is the only one we can have. If we have things which should have other attributes than size and colour, we can have loads of  classes for these in here as well.

"So it's like when you ...
...product type for 'shirt', and then you have a different product type for 'book', and book would have  a SKU ISBN number..."
I think that would be a perfectly reasonable expectation, yes.
42.00
Now I can't remember what I had!
"I think you only had small"
I only had small? Yes: we can do it. If we fail, we just fail.
[filling-in PRODUCT SKU, TITLE, IMAGE, PRICE]
"But that's an interesting question. Is there any kind of validation if you have exactly the same product, and it has exactly the same attributes?"
No.
"Or not?".
Although you could. I'm sure you could figure-out a way to validate that.

Actually these are not that hard to make, so we can make a blue medium, and use the same picture for it, and this one is going to be $21.99


So now lets make the red [types PRODUCT SKU, finds an image] we're getting to expensive shirts now. The red large

"Is it the title field ... displayed"

You can

"not by default?"

The way we're doing it, it's the node title that's being displayed. So.
"So this title field is only for the admins?"
Yes. 

44
You know what I could do with, I could do with help from that, just to see what I've got.
So I have blue medium and large, and then I have blue who-knows-what, and then I have red who knows what. And who knows what.

"You know: you already know you could have fields for that"
44.28
Yes. Oh yes. Lets do that.

I love this, this is so great, I can just type a little bit. Yes. Yes siree. yes.
And we'll add another field which is colour. Is that sweet? That's so sweet. OK: so now we can see what we've got.  So now we can see all the things we've added to the admin interface.

And we've done blue large and medium and small, and we've done red large and medium, and that's all OK. That should work fine.

So now lets go-see if we've had any sucess with our stuff here. Here's our shirts, but it has the other
46.10
I'm not sure I see
Hey Randy quit the
I've got the same problem. I don't have .... Let's go.
"
46.37
Lets go see if we can go and sort this out. Um.
We're going to go to the -er - the Product display and no we have to make the filed multi-value. That's part of the, um part of the magic here. Just make sure that the field is - that this field is multi-value.
And we should be able to have the choice of blue... You know: of colour, and size. And have it switch for us. And that's what we're not getting.
47.00
Oh! You have to have REQUIRED FIELDS! On the - er
Yuh, this is a piece of magic that shouldn't be that way.
There is an FAQ on Drupalcommerce.org that tells you exactly what to do with this.
But this is


47.58
So now we have SMALL and MEDIUM, and we have the proper things that are available there.
And it's in red. How do you get to blue? [answers by selecting from a drop-down menu] And blue has small and medium.

"Randy did you remember to add all those different products that you created to the display?
You remember there were..."

Oh I didn't do that! OK. I didn't get'em all in there. And now we're going to select all of these [using control+A to highlight every select option] and that could have been done with autocomplete or whatever. [someone is talking at the same time saying "can you have a VIEW instead of SELECT nodes?"]

"Randy: where you just were?" [a display of two shirts with the admin view and edit tabs visible], "Can you just like replace that with, certain: like - you know how certain node reference fields can reference like a VIEW of things? Instead of, like, manually selecting? Can you do that here?"

Lets's see what we can do. I don't know if we can do it here, but I'll bet you that you will be before long.

So lets go to the CONTENT TYPE.
49.00
So this is just an ordinary CONTENT TYPE, so you go to
CONTENT TYPES > PRODUCT DISPLAY > MANAGE FIELDS


...continues trying to answer the question and then finds it not yet solved...
Yup - that's the kind of thing that I am sure will be here in a little time.
49.39
So now we look here and we have all the things that we should have.
We have small medium and large.
In small we have blue and medium.
In medium we have blue and red.
And it switches for us. And we have all those things that we were asking for.
50.00
And

...we're out of blue mediums. And we can save this to the cart. And this cart is a view, of course. And I can say "checkout. And the checkout page is a view.
"That REMOVE [button on screen] by the way: that is so much better than it was in Ubercart".
Oh yes. And you can actually change that remove [button].  That remove is a Views too. So it we go-in to that, that's just one of the fields that we can have in there, and by default we have a remove button. And a delete button - so: there it is. So we can say [typing] there it is!

Oh and it didn't work either! Oh and that's the title - the title on top. But you can change the menu button.

Anyway, so on this page, which is the checkout page, you can just confugure any menus a zillion ways. Do I want this to be a five-page thing? Do I want my modules to add some extra information to the checkout? There's just so much. You can do a whole bunch of things. Like you might want to charge sales tax, which would mean that you would want to get their address before you get to the sales tax calculation. That's all wired-in there. That you can do that, already.
52.00
"So how would you - how would you an eye on sales of stock [inaudible] T shirts, if you've got less than one of them?"

For a start there is a contributed module called Commerce Stock, and it's actually got an alpha release, and it will prevent you... You can actually display the stock that you're getting: it will let you display the amount of stock that you are gettiong. The customer will see that. It will prevent them from adding-to-cart when [stock] is zero, or below. Not perfect! I doubt that any stock module is perfect. Because, like: when do you decrement [reduce stock by one] it? Do you decrement it at the checkout; do you decrement it at the shipping stage? Those are questions that you know, like the airlines don't know how to solve that problem. They just sell some [plane tickets] and hope it works out!

52.50


"Is the checkout page a view?" Sorry? "Is the checkout page a view?"
Is the checkout page a view. A view. Yes.  Here it is. We can just go and fiddle with it right there.
"inaudible ? so the footer is views flexible ?"
Yes. Actually what it has, is you have a footer.
ON A PAGE HEADED DISPLAY, clicks on FOOTER > CONFIGURE FOOTER: COMMERCE ORDER: ORDER total
And in VIEWS 3 you have these - um: what are they called? Like the footer is something provided by the module. The module can provide other footers. So the total calculation is something provided by the ...
"So the shopping cart is provided by the


53.41
So the billing information is provided by the module: just that. [shows]
I was talking about the footere here ... [shows]

53.50


[inaudbile?]
Well the way I do it is: actually I have a video on Vimeo and Drupalcommerce.org. I can show you where to find it after the show or you can find it without too much trouble. I have a video showing you how to do an import of the whole product nodes and the product reference nodes. Using the same input fields. Using the same .csv [comma separated values]. Like in my case it's coming from Amazon.com. So you can do it with the same data set. Like in a  one-to-one situation, you can do it with the same dataset. [inaudible] Yes, that's exactly what I do to.

54.52


[inaudible question about payment gateways] That's a good question. The Paypal one is in good shape; the authorise.net one is in good shape. There are like a dozen others from various countries of the world. None of them is wholly mature. But the authorize.net one I believe.... I haven't actually tested it. But I my understanding is .... and I don't think they're in bad shape. And a couple of the other ones. I mean, if you look-out on the DrupalCommerce.org page, we have a showcase page where we show some of the sites that are live. It's at Drupalcommerce.org/showcase. It's not fully filled-out yet but there's a list of some of them. And there are some cool ones! And there actually are a couple of write-ups of people building their stores on Drupalcommerce.

55.57


"Is there support yet for recurring billing?"
The recurring billing is not yet implemented. There is a service called Recurring that does recurring billing, and we expect that to be implemented within the next few weeks. No promised. Because there is a lot of paperwork!



"...roles...access to content....editing content?"
You know, because it's all wired-in - I didn't even show you RULES [module] and how this integrates with rules, but when we checked-out [in our demonstration], we could have granted a role to somebody, which is one of the ways of solving all those things that you're talking about. That's: if a role is the appropriate way to do it you could do it with a role and private files for example. I actually haven't explored that whole terretory.
57.00
But I have explored RULES in some depth, and you can do a lot of crazy stuff when you get on good terms with rules - you can really do a lot of crazy stuff! If you're writing code. You know people say: Oh - Rules. You know. You're writing code and they don't know how to write code. Well that's balloney! You're writing code. You happen to be writing it in a web browser. And you do have to understand the language of rules. But it is crazy good stuff, and if you keep it simple and you keep within the range where you understand what's going-on, then it works pretty well.

I guess that's how the whole commerce stock module works. Commerce stock provides the default  rules, so that when the inventory level goes below something: something hits. It watches the bottom. That's a rule, that you can actually change-up.

58.00


"...bundles?..." Bundles is a work in progress.

Can you complete the checkout? I'll try.


"what about donation - so I can put an open field so I can put whatever I want in, for a donation?"
58.55
[concentrates on the screen and finishing the checkout]
[then the https://www.ioby.org website from the list of completed websites on drupalcommece.org and looks to see how they do donations]
1hour - example donation
I don't actually know how they're doing it but they're doing it.
Then shows the usual background points on a chart - bigger, better, different etc etc
One point says an "Entity driven architecture based on Views and Rules"

Saturday 26 November 2011

Acquia Drupal installer: does it ever work?


.

So why mention the first two if there is a perfect answer? I suspect a trap. There are three pages on these lines according to links at the bottom of https://drupal.org/node/263. Which traps worst?

I've had this problem before but didn't write it down. Use the installer that the free Lynda.com video says is easiest:
http://www.acquia.com/downloads
Click on "Dev Desktop" and "RUN", agreeing to everything but their XMail server
Get
Folder .... not found ... please select an existing folder; do so
Get  
Error reading file C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini
I've had this before and forgotten the cause. Google it:
Your search - C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini - did not match any documents. 

Try saving the file before running it.
Get
Error reading file C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini
Try googling Aquia Drupal install Windows XP and find that there is a forum on it with 400 posts, many of them unanswered. Obscure references to trying to tidy-up your registry after a messy uninstall of this program in order to trick it into thinking it is starting again for the fist time when you have another try. Is this worth persuiing? No.
[afterthought: try Revo uninstaller to do a thorough removal of anything related to previous installs. Double click the blue drip icon of the downloaded installer again. Same problem.]

https://drupal.org/node/749846
https://drupal.org/node/161975


How to go about this a different way?
Last time I googled for different installers and found LAMP looked likely.
What's puzzling is that some people - including writers of textbooks and help videos - have no problem at all and do not see how there could be one. Others post over 400 times on a help forum without result.

https://drupal.org/documentation/install/windows
...suggests LAMP as an installer for windowsXP, and one of the people in the apache friends who wrote it wears a dog collar which makes this look like my kind of program.

Windows-Specific Guidelines - Install Drupal On Home Computer (Local). (https://drupal.org/node/263)
...suggests two server installers that already have Drupal on them










  • BitNami Drupal Stack




  • Camel shrinks wheelbarrow







  • SpikeWAMP



  • If you are bewildered by all these options, just want some nice easy instructions to follow, go and have a look at Simple install of Drupal on XAMPP. Trying out Drupal on your Windows machine couldn't be easier.
    https://drupal.org/node/749846
    https://drupal.org/node/161975
    My strategy is to attempt the simplest most standard and basic package holiday install of Ubercart on Drupal 7, hack-around the problems of posting to three different postage zones, and see what happens. So I should try BitNami Drupal Stack and then SpikeWAMP, whatever they are. Do you picture them as camels or is it just me? Something about the spikey names.

    Bitnami
    is a spiky name. The thing installed with one option about whether I wanted Drupal. Yes. There was a brief error message with no explanation at all saying that port80 was being used. Everyone at Bitnami knows the numbers of ports and their significance and assumes that Bitnami users do too. I typed in "81", thinking that ports seemed to go in numerical order.

    "https://John:81 Windows cannot find http://john:81 . Make sure that you have typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the start button and then click search"

    Well balls to Bitnami. Now time to try SikeWamp. Which was a free open source project of a company now taken over by black duck I find from the link. Finding the installer will he harder than persuading a camel to darn my socks with a needle, although to be fair camels are dumb and lack fingers.





    Bitnami: will you forget I said anything rude?

    SpikeWAMP proves impossible to track down.

    Also, I have discovered likely looking files to start in your directory, which look related to the Drupal Bitnami I downloaded and installed. Click some likely files and a screen appears with "Access Bitnami Drupal Stack as the first option on the page. Click on that and something like a Drupal site hosted on my hard disc appears.

    I have tried to turn off as many things on my control+alt+delete list as I can in case one of them was using the same port, or birth, or bus or whatever it is. Something worked. I have also googled Port80 and discovered that typing netstat -o 1 into the run box of the start menu is meant to tell me what software uses what port. It doesn't tell me anything I understand, but there's satisfaction to be had in getting that far - particularly the final 1 which repeats the process each second instead of dissapearing after one second.



    I have made the decision: Drupal Commerce does not yet work for me. After months of patience with phrases like "straight out of the box" and demonstrations on equipment different from what a shopkeeper would use, I am going back to Ubercart. Drupal 7 is so big that it needs a database upload rather than a one-click install from a server gizmo. So I install Aquia Drupal stack installer and the first thing it does, even before properly installed, is come-up with a puzzling error message. Vaguely familiar. This is where a diary helps.

    Saturday 1 October 2011

    http://www.vimeo.com/22748684 How you can build a taxonomy based catalog

    https://vimeo.com/22748684 30/02/2011
    Hullo everybody, this is Ryan Szrama with Commerce Guys. I wanted to show you today how you can build a taxonomy-based product catalog in drupal commerce as I have done on my demo website: http://demo.commerceguys.com/dc/


    If you look over here in my sidbar you will see that I have a catalog Block that lists out ["coffee holders", "conference swag", and "wearables"]
    catalog catagories that are actually  
    taxonomy terms linking them to their 
    taxonomy term Pages:
    http://demo.commerceguys.com/dc/catalog/coffee-holders
    [this shows differently on the video because it shows the site when logged-on as admin. For admin, the term page shows a coffee holder with two tabs, "view" "edit", a paragraph describing the coffee mug and an add-to-cart form with a drop-down list, that moves your page from the one about black mugs to white mugs]
    Term Pages in Drupal 7 have been enhanced a little bit, allowing you to
    • specify custom urls, [eg coffee-holders] allowing you to 
    • display a discription on a page, and giving you 
    • both a view and a quick edit link here to edit the Taxonomy Term settings.
    This particular one - Coffee Holders - has the description and it shows all of my -er different coffee holder products on the demo website.
    This ["read more" link under the mug picture] is just a Node Teaser List of product display nodes. The product display node being a special node type that I've made that has both a
    ♦ Product Reference Field on it, that turns into this handy dynamic Add To Cart Form, and then it also has a
    ♦ Taxonomy Term Reference Field on it,
    which you can see here lets me to tag this node with a particular taxonomy term and links it back to its term page.
    http://demo.commerceguys.com/dc/catalog/coffee-holders/mug

    1 Create a taxonomy vocabulary


    Now if you wanted to build something like this yourself, the first thing you would need to do, is to create a taxonomy vocabulary for your catalog:
    example.com/catalog/coffee-holders/mug#overlay=admin/structure/taxonomy
    admin>structure>taxonomy>edit vocabulary [pictures at about 1'24" on the video]
    So you can see here my catalog vocabulary, and if we look at the terms I've listed, my three terms are each present, and each one of them has
    • a name, 
    • a description, and 
    • a custom url alias that just provides a nice search engine friendly url for this term page on the front.

    2 Go build a menu; enable a bloc


    Once you've listed out each of your taxonomy terms, the next step is to go build a menu for this.
    So I'm going to go to stucture>menus, and you can see here that I have a catalog menu, where I have manually added links to each of the term pages.
    [screen shows remembered "search engine friendly url" typed into the box. This can be found by going back to >structure>taxonomy>edit vocabulary to cut-and-paste]
    Er - Whenever you create these links you can actually use the search engine friendly path that you have defined, and whenever you save this menu link, it will be converted to the actual Drupal path that has been assigned to that taxonomy term.
    Whenever you create a menu you automatically get a block, that you can then enable, to show that menu in any of your sidebars. Here ...
    structure>blocks [first option on the structure tab]
    ...you can see my catalog menu block has been placed into the first sidebar. This is a region in the Corolla theme which now has to be installed after Adaptive Themes Core. Once installed it has a tab on the blocks menu. From that tab you see the options shown in the video, where shopping cart, catalog, user menu and user login are all selected for the first sidebar, and I've configured this bloc...
    [from the "configure" link on the "catalog" line]
    ...to not appear on checkout pages - notice I've used checkout asterisk so it will block all of the checkout pages, so that whenever you go to checkout and are in any step of the checkout process, er you do not have a sidebar. I did this to reduce distraction and noise on the checkout form so that the customer doesn't have distraction and when they're trying to complete the checkout process and give you their nolas.
    Once you have
    ♦ built the taxonomy vocabulary,
    ♦ the menu item,
    ♦ put your bloc in place...

    3 Create a Product node type


    the next step is to actually have nodes showing-up in your teaser lists. Drupal Commerce will install a default product type whenever you first enable everything.
    store>products second tab is "product type"
    On this demo site I also have a T shirt product type, um, for my T-shirt products, er: I'll discuss that in a different screencast [about sized products].
    Once you have product types though, the next step is to create a product display node type. So I'm going to go to my Content Types menu.
    structure>content type second option on the structure list
    You see here I have a product display node type, and the reason being: even though I have product types in the back end, I can list out all the products on my website on the back end, there is no automatic point of display for them on the front end. We've separated-out the front end from the back end in Drupal Commerce, er so that you have a lot more freedom to detirmine how you want to display products to your customers. Whether it's through product display nodes as I am , or some other method involving Views, or Pagemanager and Panels, or something else entirely!
    If we look at the fields that I have put on this product display node type, you can see both my product reference field, and my [Taxonomy] Term reference field.
    I like the autocomplete textfield wiget...
    https://drupal.org/project/autocomplete_widgets
    ...because it lets me enter products on this node, using the product SKU with the product title with an autocomplete. And I can have as many as I want to, without having to bother with the multi-select select list, or perhaps just an overwhelming checkboxes list if you have many products on the website.
    I also have a catalog catagory term reference select list.
    So what you do is:
    whenever you add a term reference field, you have to choose which vocabulary this is for, and then of course the widget select list autocomplete radios [radio buttons] so that on the product page - which I'll go to this right now - um so that on its edit form, you get to specify how exactly... - I'm denoting which catalog catagory this belongs to. So you can see here my Product Reference Field with the autocomplete, my catalog term reference field with the select list, and again how this is presented on the front end, with an add to cart form, and a link going back to the term page.
    Well those are all the things that you need to know, to build your taxonomy based drupal commerce product catalog. Let me pull-up a .pdf here that shows you the different steps: [the order is slightly different on the .pdf]
    ♦ Create a "Catalog" taxonomy vocabulary, with terms for each of your categories.
    ♦ Create a "Product display" node type using a product reference field and a term reference field, and create nodes for your products.
    ♦ Create a "Cataolog" menu and display its block.
    ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦
    forum thread

    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".

    the world in three parts

    More on this subject at https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tourist-guide-to-royal-mail-and-small.html

    Julius Caeser write that Gall is divided into three parts, and Royal Mail has done the same for world postal zones (or four if you are fussy), so come the new year 20010/11 I thought I had found a way to do the same for Drupal and Ubercart. Take three of the existing hundred or more countries. My home country is the UK. That's already known to Ubercart. Europe and Airmail are the others.

    Now, if I over-ran two obscure countries in the code of Ubercart and renamed them "Europe" and "Airmail" and deleted all the others I would be happy. I chose Andorra and American Samoa, because I thought the invasions would go un-noticed, and had a test site more or less working. There was no need to understand the code to be hacked - just a bit of patience finding it and some trial and error. According to the code, these countries were still Andora and American Samoa, but they were printed on screen as Europe and Airmail.

    By 2011, Drupal 7 was finished but Drupal Commerce - ubercart's successor - was only starting so it seemed worth a little bit of a wait to see how the new program tidied-up the problem.

    uk unemployment 1980s

    This post might become a transcript of a 1980s UK economics textbook chapter, done in order to see whether the book deliberately lied or deliberately mis-led about the government's effect on the recession at that time or whether it just failed to win my confidence. I think it just failed to win confidence. The chapter is headed "26 Unemployment", which is an odd place in a textbook to put the chapter on unemployment when the total was three or four milllion in 1984 when the book was published. There was no chapter called "why all the factories are closing", but there was a rather technical reference, even later in the book, which described the closure process caused by government's policy on interest rates that tweaked the exchange rate.


    Related: Bad Economics Teaching for the twenty-teens from data on Unistats, 2015 Better Economics Teaching: some off-the-cuff suggestions based on being a 1980s student The British Economic Crisis - a similar book to Robert Peston written in the 80s - Star Courses: the least satisfied, most bored and lowest paid UK graduates, written 2015 Boring Economics Teaching is interesting: how someone managed to teach economics from memories of an old textbook at the peak of the worst recession since the 1930s, and tried to cover-up for government causing the recession. Journal Articles by Professor Les Fishman - unbelievable beliefs - 1980s recession explanations I wrote - UK unemployment 1980s from the Begg 1984 textbook


    In the early 1930s, more than one quarter of the UK labour force was unemployed. In particular regions and occupations the unemployment rate was very much higher. [employment of economics teachers was hardly effected at all]. High unemployment means that the economy is throwing away output by failing to put its people to work. It also means misery, social unrest, and hopelessness for the unemployed. Over the following 40 years, macroeconomic policy was geared to avoiding a rerun of the 1930s. Figure 26-1 shows that it succeeded.

    In the 1970s views about unemployment bagan to change. People began to reject the Keynsian pessimism about the capacity of the economy to respond to shocks by quickly restoring full employment. The classical model began to be more widely accepted as a description of the way the economy works even in the relatively short run. Since in the classical model unemployment is voluntary there is less presumption that unemployment means extreme human suffering. Moreover, research by labour economists has shown that in the 1950s and 1960s most of the unemployed quickly found jobs. Unemployment might therefore be considered a stepping stone to a better job.

    By the 1970s, not only was it felt that the cost of unemployment might have been overstated; in addition, governments in many countries began to percieve an even greater danger to economic and social stability, the danger of high and rising inflation. Thus by the end of the 1970s many governments had embarked on tight monetary and fiscal policies into try to keep inflation under control. The combination of restrictive demand policies and the adverse supply shock of hte second major OPEC oil price increase in 1979-80 has led to a dramatic increase in unemployment in most of the industrial countries in the early 1980s. Figure 26-1 shows data for the UK. Data for other countries are shown later in the chapter.

    High unemployment is one of the major problems of the 1980s. Will it contine? Is it a drain on society or a signal that iat lst people are getting out of dead end jobs into something better? What can and should the government be doing? These are the questions we set out to answer in this chapter. We begin by looking at the facts.

    26-1 THE FACTS

    Not everyone wants a job. Those who do are called the labour force.
    The participation rate is the percentage of the population of working age who declare themselves to be in the labour force. In Chapter 10 we pointed out that postwar growth of the UK labour force had been caused by an increase in the population of working age who declare themselves to be in the labour force. In Chapter10 we pointed out that postwar growth iof the UK labour force has been caused less by an increase in the population of working age than by an increase on paricipation rates, most noticably by married women.
    The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labour foce who are withoug a job but are registered as being willing and vailable for work.
    Of course some people without a job are really looking for work but have not bothered to register as unemployed. These people will not be included in the official statistics for the registered labour forcem nor will they appear as registered unemployed. Yet from an economic viewpoint, such people are unemployed. This is an important phenominon to which we return shortly. For the momentm when we present evidence on the size of the labour force or the number of people unemployedm it should be undestood that data refer to the registered labour force and the registered unemployed.

    Figure 26-1 makes two main points about the unemployment rate in the UK.
    First, unemployment was high during the interwar years, especially during the great recession of the 1930s. It was the persistance of unemployment that led Keynes to develop his General Theory.
    Second, by comparison, post war unemployment was tiny until the late 1970s. By the early 1980s it was starting to get back to prewar levels. This basic pattern applies in many other industrialised countries. [I doubt this is true - JR]

    Stocks and Flows

    Unemployment is a stock concept measured at a point in time. Like a pool of water, its level rises when inflows (the newly unemployed) exceed outflows (people getting new jobs or quitting t he labour force altogether). Figure 26-2 illustrates this important idea. Beginning with people working, there arc three ways to become unemployed. Some people are sacked or made redundant (job-losers); some are temporarily laid off but expect eventually to be rehired by the same company; and sonic people voluntarily quit their existing jobs. But the inflow to unemployment can also come from people not previously in the labour force: school-leavers (new entrants), and people who once had a job, then ceased even to register as unemployed, and are now coming back into the labour force in search of a job (re-entrants). People leave the unemployment pool in the opposite directions. Some get jobs. Others give up looking for jobs and leave the labour force completely. Although some of this latter group may simply have reached the retirement age at which they can draw a pension, many of them are discouraged workers, people who have become depressed about the prospects of ever finding a job and decide to stop even trying. Between January 1980 and January 1983, the number of people registered as unemployed in Britain rose from 1.3 million to 3.1 million. Data collected through Department of Employment



    jobccntres account for most of this increase and .11 shown in Table 26-1. The table makes the 1)( wit that the pool of unemployment is not skignant. Even with 3 million unemployed, this tit her is less than the number of people entering and leaving the pool every year.


















    I I )nr.itioll thiciiiplovnicnt When un-employment is high, people have to spend longer in the pool before they find a way out.
    Table 26-2 gives data on the duration of unemployment. As the level of unemployment has risen, the problem of the long-term unemployed has returned. Whereas in 1974 only 20 per cent of the people unemployed had been out of work for longer than one year, by April 1983 this pro-portion had risen to 36 per cent. And over the same period, the fraction of the unemployed who had been unemployed for less than eight weeks fell from 44 to 17 per cent. Unemployment can no longer be regarded as a temporary stopover on the way to better things.
    The Composition of Unemployment Table 26-3 gives a recent breakdown of unemployment by sex and by age. A recession hits young workers badly. Unlike established workers with accumulated skills and job experience, young workers have to be trained from scratch, and firms frequently cut back on training when times are tough. The over-50s are also vulner-able during a recession. If they lose their existing job, they will find it tough to persuade a firm to spend on them what little training money is available; firms would rather spend the money on younger workers, who may represent a better long-term investment and may be able to learn more quickly. Table 26-3 also shows that the unemployment rate is lower for women than for men. In part this may reflect the fact that employment in the declining heavy engineering industries has tradi-tionally been predominantly male, so men are worst hit by redundancies in steelworks and shipyards. However, although established women have managed to hang on to their jobs, young women are finding it nearly as tough as young men to get started. Labour economists believe that the discrepancy between male and female workers is smaller than the table suggests, because unemployed women are less likely than unemployed men to register as unemployed. Hence the true un-employment rates for women are probably higher than the table suggests.

    26-2 THE FRAMEWORK 


    Having introduced some of the most important facts about unemployment in the UK, we now develop a theoretical framework in which to discuss the subject. We begin with the old-style classification of types of unemployment, which emphasizes the source of the problem. Then we discuss the modern approach to unemployment which emphasizes the way people in the labour market are behaving.
    Types of Unemployment Economists used to classify unemployment a frictional, structural, demand-deficient, or clamp ical. We discuss each in turn.

    Frictional Unemployment
    This is the irredrit ible minimum level of unemployment in .1 dynamic society. It includes people wIr.)4e physical or mental handicaps make them aim, 'NI unemployable, but it also includes the pc(11►1, spending short spells in unemployment Ir. ■ hop between jobs in an economy where b( )111 r h. labour force and the jobs on offer are cont in tr.111‘ changing.

    Structural Unemployment
    In the longer run, the pattern of demand and production is alwir‘ 4 changing. In Chapter 31 we discuss the re.r,...114 why particular countries in the world CC(111411M come to specialize in the production of 1).11 ticular commodities at particular times. In re, (Au decades industries such as textiles and heavy engineering have been declining in the UK, Structural unemployment refers to unemployment arising because there is a mismatch oi and job opportunities when the pAtIci II of

    Itint.t i id and production changes. For example, a 44111C(I welder may have worked for 25 years in %Ittplwilding but is made redundant at 50 when the industry contracts in the face of foreign competition. That worker may have to retrain in it new which is more in demand in today's et 'II( )111y. But firms may be reluctant to take on mid it din older workers. Such workers become victims of structural unemployment.

    Demand-deficient Unemployment
    This refers Keynesian unemployment, when aggregate dentaild falls and wages and prices have not yet 'Owed to restore full employment. Aggregate Jett l id is deficient because it is lower than full-iv merit aggregate demand. In chapter 25 we saw that, until wages and have adjusted to their new long-run equilibrium level, a fall in aggregate demand will lead lower output unemployment. Some workers will want to work at the going real wage rate but will he unable to find jobs. Only in the longer run ill wAr,e,, And prices fall enough to boost the


    real money supply and lower interest rates to the extent required to restore aggregate demand to its full-employment level, and only then will demand-deficient unemployment be eliminated.
    Classical Unemployment Since the classical model assumes that flexible wages and prices maintain the economy at full employment, classi-cal economists had some difficulty explaining the high unemployment levels of the 1930s. Their diagnosis of the problem was partly that union power was maintaining the wage rate above its equilibrium level and preventing the required adjustment from occurring. Classical unemployment describes the unemployment created when the wage is deliberately maintained above the level at which the labour supply and labour demand schedules intersect. It can be caused either by the exercise of trade union power or by minimum wage legislation which enforces a wage in excess of the equilibrium wage rate. The modern analysis of unemployment takes


    the same types of unemployment but classifies them rather differently in order to highlight their behavioural implications and consequences for government policy. Modern analysis stresses the difference between voluntary and involuntary unemployment.

    The Natural Rate of Unemployment Figure 26-3 shows the market for labour. The labour demand schedule LD slopes downwards, showing that firms will take on more workers at a lower real wage. The schedule LF shows how









































    many people want to be in the labour force at each real wage. We assume that an increase in the real wage increases the number of people wishing to work. The schedule AJ shows how many people accept job offers at each real wage. The schedule lies to the left of the LF schedule, both because some people are inevitably between jobs at any instant, and because a particular real wage may tempt some people into the labour force even though they will accept a job offer only if they find an offer with a rather higher real wage than average. Labour market equilibrium occurs at the point E. The employment level N* is the equilibrium or full-employment level. The distance EF is called the natural rate of un-employment. The natural rate of unemployment is the rate of unemployment when the labour market is in equilibrium. This unemployment is entirely voluntary. At the equilibrium real wage w"-, N, people want to be in the labour force but only N"- want to accept job offers; the remainder don't want to work at the equilibrium real wage. Which of our earlier types of unemployment must we include in the natural rate,of unemploy-ment? Certainly all frictional unemployment. But we should also include structural unemploy. ment. Suppose a skilled welder earned £150 a week before being made redundant. The issue is not why the worker became redundant (the decline of the steel industry), but why the worker refuses to take a lower wage as a dishwasher in order to get a job, or why steelworkers as a whole did not take a sufficient wage cut to allow the steel industry to remain profitable and com+ petitive at its former levels of output and em-ployment. If the answer is that steelworkers refuse to accept that the equilibrium wage for their skill has fallen, and refuse to work at wages lower than those to which they have been accus-tomed, then we must count this unemploymen as voluntary and include it in the natural rate. They are not prepared to work at the going wag rate but still want to be considered part of tlic. labour force.
    What about classical unemployment, for ex-., mple where unions maintain wages above their equilibrium level? This is shown in Figure 26-3 a wage rate w2 above w"-. Total unemploy-ment is now given by the distance AC. As indi-v iduals, a number of workers AB would like to ta ke jobs at the wage rate w2 but will be unable o find them since firms will wish to be at the point A. As individuals, these workers are in-voluntarily unemployed. A worker is involuntarily unemployed if he or she would accept a job offer at the going wage rate. lowever, through their unions, workers collec-t i v el y decide to opt for the wage rate w2 in excess 1 the equilibrium wage, thereby reducing the level of employment. Hence for workers as a w hole we must regard the extra unemployment .1., voluntary. Thus we also include classical imemployment in the natural rate of unemploy-ment. If in the long run unions maintain the w .1 gc lv,, the economy will remain at A and AC is the natural rate of unemployment. 'Ilk leaves only Keynesian or demand-deficient mei i t ployment. Such unemployment is involun-ta r v, being caused by sluggish labour market ustment beyond the control of individual workers or unions. Thus we can divide total unemployment into the equilibrium or natural ate the equilibrium level determined by normal labour market turnover, structural mi%itiatch, union power, and incentives in the 1,111( 1111. market — and Keynesian unemployment, ►ict lilies called demand-deficient or cyclical unemployment — the disequilibrium level of lily( )1tintary unemployment caused by the com-hin.ition of low aggregate demand and wage oilinstment which is sluggish for the reasons we t.N.iiiiined in the previous chapter. l'his division helps us think clearly about the guvernment policies required to tackle the un-employment problem. Since we have argued that fit the long run the economy will gradually niaiLage to get back to full employment through slow process of wage and price adjustment, Keynesian unemployment will eventually get rid

    of itself. But in the short run, Keynesian un-employment is the part of total unemployment that the government could help mop up by using fiscal and monetary policy to boost aggregate demand, rather than waiting for wage and price reductions to increase the real money supply and lower interest rates. In contrast, the natural rate of unemployment tells us the part of unemployment that will not be eliminated merely by restoring aggregate demand to its full-employment level. The natural rate is the 'full-employment' level of unemployment. To reduce the natural rate, supply-side policies operating on labour market incentives will be needed. This is the framework we employ for the rest of the chapter. We begin by investigating the large increase in unemployment over the last decade, in order to understand its causes more fully. Then we discuss the prospects for unem-ployment during the rest of the 1980s and the policy options open to the government.

    26-3 WHY IS UNEMPLOYMENT SO HIGH?

    By 1983 the UK unemployment rate was more than eight times as high as it was in 1965. The task for empirical economists is to try to say how much of this increase was caused by an increase in the natural rate of unemployment and how much was caused by deficient demand and slugg-ish wage adjustment. In Table 26-4 we give some recent estimates of the forces at work, based on the work by Professor Steve Nickell of the London School of Economics. Nickell's esti-mates were derived from data on male unemployment, which is more comprehensively and reliably documented than the unemployment of women.'
    ' For other attempts to estimate the natural rate of un-employment in the UK, see R. A. Batchelor and T. D. Sheriff, `Unemployment and Unanticipated Inflation in the UK', Economica, 1980; and Patrick Minford, Unemployment: Cause and Cure, Martin Robertson, 1983.




    In considering the prospects for unemploy-ment in the rest of the 1980s, we begin by looking at how the government could get the natural rate of unemployment down to a lower level. Then we consider how quickly Keynesian unemployment could be reduced.

    26-4 SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS

    Keynesians believe that the economy can deviate from full employment for quite a long time, cer-tainly for a period of several years. Monetarists believe that the classical full-employment model is relevant much more quickly. But everyone agrees that in the long run the performance of the economy can be changed only by affecting the level of full employment and the correspond-ing level of potential output. Supply-side economics is the use of micro-economic incentives to alter the level of full employment, the level of potential output, and the natural rate of unemployment. Although in this section we are interested chiefly in how to change the natural rate of unemploy-ment, it is convenient to discuss some of the wider implications of supply-side economics at the same time. We return to the determination of potential output in Chapter 29.
    Income Tax Cuts One of the key themes of supply-side economists is the benefits. that stem from reducing the marginal rate of income tax. The marginal rate of income tax is the fraction of each extra pound of income that the government takes in income tax. We discussed tax rates and work incentives in detail in Chapter 10. We pointed out that a cut in marginal tax rates, and a consequent increase in the take-home pay derived from the last hour's work, tend to make people substitute work for leisure. But against this substitution effect must be set an income effect. To the extent that people now pay less in taxes, they will have to do less work to obtain any given target living standard.
    Thus, theoretical economics cannot prove that income tax cuts increase the desired labour supply, and in fact most empirical studies con-firm that, at best, tax cuts lead to only a small increase in the supply of labour. We gave some details in Chapter 10 and give some more in Box 26-2. Figure 26-5 may be used to analyse the effect of a cut in marginal tax rates. The labour demand schedule LD shows that firms demand more workers at a lower real wage. We draw a steep schedule LF showing that higher after-tax real wage rates, at best, lead to only a small increase in the number of people wishing to be in the labour force. The schedule AJ shows how many
    FIGURE 26-5 A CUT IN MARGINAL INCOME TAX RATES.





    An income tax makes the net-of-tax wage received by households lower than the gross wage paid by firms. When the vertical distance AB measures the amount each worker pays in income tax, equilibrium employment is N,, the quantity that households wish to supply at the after-tax wage w, and that firms demand at the gross wage w. At the after-tax wage w, the natural rate of unemployment is the horizontal distance BC. If income tax were abolished, equilibrium would be at E. Employment would rise from N, to N, and the natural rate of unemployment would fall from BC to EF. Relative to the fixed level of unemployment benefit, the rise in take-home pay from w, to w, reduces the level of voluntary unemployment.







    wi
    LD
    Ni N2 Number of workers
    people wish to accept job offers at each real wage. It is drawn for a given (real) level of unemployment benefit. Hence the horizontal distance between the AJ and LF schedules — the it umber of people in the workforce refusing to work at each real wage, or the amount of voluntary unemployment — decreases as the real wage rises relative to the given level of un-employment benefit. Thus the figure incorporates lie fact that a reduction in the replacement ratio, t he ratio of unemployment benefit to wage rates, reduces voluntary unemployment. Suppose initially that there is a marginal 11 come tax rate equal to the vertical distance AB. lhe equilibrium level of employment will then he N, . Why? Because income tax drives a wedge between the gross-of-tax wages paid by firms the net-of-tax wages received by workers. At t lie employment level N, firms are happy to hire this quantity of labour at the gross wage w,. Subtracting the income tax rate AB, N, workers kN'allt to take job offers at the after-tax wage w3. I 'II us N, is the equilibrium level of employment. l'he horizontal distance BC shows the natural ,it e of unemployment, the number of workers in I In' labour force not wishing to work at the going r.i I e of take-home pay. To show the effect of a cut in marginal tax ales, suppose that income taxes were abolished. gross wage and the take-home pay now oiiicide, and the new labour market equilibrium IL, at L. Note that two things have happened. First the equilibrium level of employment has ri wit. Second, although more people wish to be III the labour force because take-home pay has increased from w, to w2, the natural rate of unemployment has fallen from the distance BC t > the smaller distance EF. A rise in take-home pay relative to unemployment benefit reduces I he level of voluntary unemployment. Si nil lar effects would be obtained if, instead of cti t t i lig income tax, the level of unemployment benefit were cut. For a given labour force schedule :1;, fewer people would now wish to he un-employed at any real wage. I fence the schedule (I I, showing acceptances of job of furs, would
    UNEMPLOYMENT 599
    shift to the right. Again, the effect would be both to increase the equilibrium level of employment (and hence of potential output) and to reduce the natural rate of unemployment by reducing the replacement ratio. What about the effect of changes in the national insurance contributions paid both by firms and by workers? These are mandatory contributions to state schemes which provide unemployment and health insurance. They act like an income tax in driving a wedge AB between the total cost to a firm of hiring another worker and the net take-home pay of a worker. Figure 26-5 shows that a reduction in these contributions will increase the equilibrium level of employment, increase the equilibrium level of take-home pay, reduce the replacement ratio, and reduce the natural rate of unemployment.
    Other Policies Aimed at Labour Supply In Figure 26-3 we showed that, by restricting labour supply, unions could force firms up their labour demand schedule. In consequence, the equilibrium real wage would be higher but the equilibrium level of employment lower. Since a higher real wage reduces employment but (slightly) increases the number of people wishing to be in the labour force, we said that in raising real wages unions had increased the natural rate of unemployment. Collectively, labour had opted for higher wages and more unemployment. Conversely, the natural rate of unemployment will be reduced if the power of organized labour is weakened. Unions will then be less successful in restricting labour supply and forcing up wages. Hence any government intervention in the labour market to weaken the monopoly power of trade unions should be classified as a supply-side policy aimed at reducing the natural rate of unemployment and increasing equilibrium employment and potential output. Such policies would include changes in the law governing trade union activities, or incomes policies — direct regulation of wages — if the aim of the latter is to reduce real wages.'Phis need not he the sole aim


    BOX 26-2
    DOES THE TAX CARROT WORK?
    Do tax cuts make people work harder? It is important to distinguish two aspects of the labour supply decision.
    HOW MANY HOURS TO WORK A lower marginal tax rate makes an extra hour of leisure more expensive in terms of the income and goods sacrificed by not working. It makes people substitute work for leisure. But tax cuts also increase workers' disposable incomes, making them want to consume more leisure. This income effect makes them want to work less. The table below is taken from a highly readable survey of incentive effects on labour supply, 'The Tax Carrot', by Professor Steve Nickell, published in Management Today, September 1980. Based on work by Professor Tony Atkinson of the London School of Economics and Professor Nick Stern of Warwick University, the table shows that the 1979 income tax cut in the UK should not have been expected to lead to a spon-taneous eruption of work effort. Nickell's survey shows that this is the over-whelming conclusion of many studies of work effort in the UK.
    EFFECT ON WORK EFFORT OF A CUT IN INCOME TAX RATES FROM 33 TO 30 PER CENT
    WORKERS WITH 1979 ANNUAL GROSS INCOME OF: £4800 £5460 £8990 £10 920 £13 759
    — 2.1% — 1.8% — 0.4% + 0.2% + 1.8%
    WHETHER OR NOT TO WORK The second aspect of labour supply, and the one in which we are primarily interested in this chapter, is whether or not individuals want to work at all. Again we must consider the income and substitution effects of higher take-home pay on the decision about whether or not to work. The UK evidence, surveyed in C. V. Brown, Taxation and the Incentive to Work, Oxford University Press, 1980, shows that for men the income and substitution effects cancel out. However, for women higher take-home pay does lead to more women wishing to join the labour force. One possible reason, which we discussed in Chapter 10, is that at low wage rates it may not be possible to offset the costs (commuting, babysitters, etc.) that must be incurred when working. Hence in this chapter we assume that the labour force schedule LF is not vertical. Higher real wages increase the total number of people wishing to work, though not by very much. By increasing real take-home pay, income tax cuts will lead to a small increase in the labour force.

    of incomes policies, as we explain in the next chapter. Earlier, we pointed out that frictional and structural unemployment are important com-ponents of the natural rate of unemployment. Policies aimed at reducing frictional and struc-t it ral unemployment should also be included in stipply-side economics. Their objective is to shift he AJ schedule to the right relative to any given position of the labour force schedule LF. Among such policies we include grants that llow redundant workers to retrain in relevant skills, and the various government measures introduced to help school-leavers develop skills and job experience for the first time. By making the labour force more suited to employers' needs, such policies aim to allow firms to make wage offers that unemployed workers will find ceptable. Hence such measures reduce voluntary unemployment.
    Policies Aimed at the Demand for Labour Thus far, we have emphasized policies aimed at t he supply of workers for employment. We now turn to the demand for workers by firms. In the previous chapter we saw that an adverse supply s I wk could reduce the demand for labour, shift-ing the LD schedule downwards. It seems plausible that the two dramatic rises in real oil prices in the 1970s had this effect. Overnight, many energy-intensive factories were inade economically obsolete by the rise in oil 1,rices. 'l'hey could no longer compete with more modern energy-saving plant. It was as if many 1st i ng firms had suffered a reduction in their usei HI capital stock. Since labour now had to )1-1K with a smaller quantity of relevant capital equipment, the marginal product of labour was !educed at each employment level. This can be I (presented in Figure 26-5 by a downward shift t be labour demand schedule LD. Try constructing your own diagram to show the effect of this. (Forget about income taxes and %1 .11A Iroiui the point F, in Figure 26-5.) If you draw the diagram correctly you will discover





    [more to follow if this chapter is not transcribed yet. It relates to a later post about bad economics teaching in the 1980s which ignored the manufacturing crisis that had caused 3-4 million people to be unemployed, many of them close to the campus, and preferred to teach the usual graphs and a lot of statistics that couldn't be used instead.]