Promet Source: On a 1-10, How Important is Your Drupal Website?

That’s a question we sometimes ask clients or people we meet at Drupal events.  It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The answer is always at least “10.”  There’s rarely any need to expound upon the pivotal role that websites play in the current climate. For higher education, websites represent make-or-break first, second, and third impressions, and much more. 

Lullabot: Lullabot Podcast: AI in Action: Navigating Generative Tech at Lullabot

Host Matt Kleve assembles a crack team of Lullabot experts from various company departments to share their hands-on experiences and insights into how innovative technology influences and enhances our field.

We discuss integrating AI into coding, design, and tasks like writing emails and RFP responses, along with the broader implications for the future of web development.

Join us as we navigate the complexities, challenges, and vast potential of Generative AI in shaping our world.

cyberschorsch.dev: Introducing the Monitoring Ntfy.sh Integration Module: Real-time Notifications for Drupal Monitoring

Empower your Drupal site with instant notifications using the Monitoring Ntfy.sh Integration module. My new module seamlessly integrates with Ntfy.sh, allowing you to receive real-time alerts and updates based on your Drupal site's monitoring results. Learn how to enhance your site's monitoring capabilities and stay informed with timely notifications in my blog post.

Centarro: Drupal Commerce development sprint at DrupalCon Prague

It's been three years since DrupalCon Amsterdam, the last time we were able to bring our American and European teams together at a DrupalCon. In remote work years, that's practically an eternity, so we're stoked to be back together again during DrupalCon Prague. 🤘🏼

This time around we decided to "focus on us" after a busy summer of client project launches coordinated around vacation schedules. Instead of staffing a booth, we'll be hosting a weeklong Drupal Commerce maintenance sprint focused on various Commerce Core, Commerce Kickstart, and Centarro certified project issues.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to join us physically or remotely. If you have a patch ready for review already in one of the related queues, tag it with KickstartPrague2022 and we'll do our best to take a look!

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Centarro: Commerce Core 2.31 (and more!) features in review

We've packaged three releases of Commerce Core this year, from the 2.29 release in February to this month's 2.31 release. While DrupalCon, Kickstart development, and client launches have kept us busy, we wanted to take the opportunity to share the good news while we take a breather before DrupalCon Prague.

Each release includes general maintenance and modernization work, improving PHP 8.1 and Drupal 10 support while keeping up with tax rate changes around the world. They also include a variety of minor bug fixes and enhancements, like database indexes to improve performance or new permissions to support finer grained store management. Altogether, we've seen 87 issues resolved by dozens of contributors.

In this blog post, we'll review the more significant new features, including for BOGO promotions, product display pages, and order management.

"Buy One Get One" promotions

Commerce Core 2.x has always included BOGO promotion support, including the ability to adjust the quantities (which is why we call it "Buy X, Get Y" in the UI) and fine tune other rules around applicability. Thanks to a variety of merchants pushing the limits of what core can do, we found fixed a few bugs and found ways to improve the feature. In particular, we've ensured that:

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Centarro: The ABCs of PDPs and PLPs

While many Drupal developers have at least some eCommerce experience, the number of people in our community who make it their primary focus is rather small. This isn't surprising, given Drupal is most often used as a CMS, not an eCommerce platform. However, it does mean that when you encounter an eCommerce opportunity, you may not be making the most effective pitch you can to win the merchant's business. One way to improve your pitch is to make sure you're using the same vocabulary to describe eCommerce features and concepts as the rest of the eCommerce industry. It's all too easy for us as Drupal developers to rely on our internal vocabulary, but merchants comparing your proposals, case studies, or Drupal Commerce articles won't have the slightest clue what Taxonomy Terms, Views, or Search API indexes are. Learning and using industry standard terms will help you build clarity and confidence with your eCommerce prospects and customers, reducing the amount of work they have to do to understand your proposals and compare them against other solutions to see exactly where Drupal Commerce comes out on top. Read more

Centarro: See you at DrupalCon Portland 2022!

It's been three looong years since the Drupal community gathered in Seattle (and two and a half since Amsterdam). DrupalCon Portland is the reunion we've been waiting for, and we can't wait to get there and share.

Virtual events are nice for keeping tabs on what your peers are doing, but nothing beats the large scale casual exchange of ideas at an event like DrupalCon. We recommend using the event to reconnect to the high level developments in various Drupal initiatives and using sessions and smaller conversations to go deep on the topics most directly impactful to your work.

To that end, we'll have the Centarro booth 404/406 setup to chat about all things Drupal Commerce! If you're planning, building, or operating a Drupal Commerce site, we'd love for you to come tell us about it. The impact our modules have on individuals, families, and companies all over the world gives meaning to our work that transcends the mere writing of a module or theme.

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Centarro: Replace Swift Mailer with Symfony Mailer for HTML email

When you're theming a Drupal Commerce site, you shouldn't forget to style the emails your store sends. The primary use case is the checkout completion email that includes the customer's receipt, but there may be others depending on your feature set and customizations (e.g. dunning emails for recurring subscriptions).

Commerce Core provides a basic, table based template that you'll want to either replace or at least ensure is styled by your theme to reflect your branding. (Find it in the order module's templates directory, commerce-order-receipt.html.twig.) However, without adding the capacity to properly send HTML email from your site, it's going to look like a jumbled mess in your customer's inbox.

We've long recommended Swift Mailer for formatting and sending HTML emails from Drupal Commerce. Symfony announced the project's deprecation late last year, recommending folks switch to using the 3 year old Symfony Mailer instead after they brought it up to full feature parity with the Swift Mailer library.

Fortunately, there's a module for that!

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Centarro: Commerce Core 2.25 expands payment, coupon, and promotion management

We released Commerce Core 2.25 on June 30th, 2021. This release kicks off a new schedule that focuses on feature releases once a quarter with bug fix / minor patch releases in the intervening months, giving us time to focus on our other modules as well. Our efforts for this release centered around store administration improvements, Layout Builder integration, and general performance and stability improvements. We also reviewed our code to ensure we had solutions or a roadmap for changes required by Brexit and the EU July 2021 eCommerce VAT package.

Store administration improvements

As with the 2.24 release, our work with multiple large merchants continued to drive store administration improvements throughout the 2.25 development cycle. This release packs in features related to payment administration, coupon administration, and promotion configuration in addition to quality of life improvements in one of our main dependencies, State Machine.

New payment entry options

Until this release, store administrators wanting to enter a new payment for an order could only do so using stored payment methods previously created by the customer. Several years ago, Drupal Commerce contributor Brad Jones kicked off development of a major feature patch to add support for the creation of new payment methods in the order management interface. This is particularly helpful for customer service representatives placing orders for customers who do not have accounts or stored payment methods on their sites yet.

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