SoundPost Media

I'm pleased to announce the following:

• My co-authors and I have completed a rough draft of this white paper and we're actively refining it to get to a completed first draft.
• Ned McClain of Applied Trust has joined the project as a co-author. Ned's expertise and years of experience in this field has been an extremely valuable asset and this project will continue to benefit as a direct result of his input.
• A heartfelt thanks to Ryan Cross of CrossFunctional for becoming our latest project sponsor.
• The article that sparked this project (Let's Talk About PCI Compliance for Ubercart and Drupal Commerce) has crossed 2500 page views. This reinforces (at least to me) that there is a demand for more information on this subject matter.

Drupal makes it incredibly easy to turn even the simplest website into a full fledged commerce solution. All you have to do is download a few modules, check a few boxes, and you’re up and running in no time! Now you can sell your products around the clock to anyone in the world with a credit card. And because there is a strong focus on security within the Drupal community, it’s easy to convince ourselves that nothing can go wrong while we move onto building out the next feature or launching the next website.

• You use Dropbox as your version control system.
• You download and install 1000+ Drupal modules “just in case” you need them.
• You give anonymous users permission to Views UI "so they can customize their experience."
• You provide the PHP filter option for the comment field in order to find Drupal talent by seeing who can hack your site first.
• You give anonymous users the “Administer permissions” privilege so they don't have to bug you in order to turn on a feature for themselves.

While smart money is betting on the Commerce module(s) as the goto e-commerce solution for Drupal 7 and beyond, the decision on which solution YOU should use today is not always easy. Because sometimes the answer is neither! To help cut through all the confusion and (hopefully) shed some light on the debate, I was invited to give a short presentation at the Denver Drupal meetup to compare and contrast the two. While the talk was by no means the definitive answer, it intent was merely to help people understand the key differences in and get started on their own evaluation.

Here is a simple video I put together to go over some high level tips and strategies for designing content types for a new Drupal site. Basically you want to remember 4 things:

• Will I actually use this content type enough to warrant it's own designation?
• Can I simplify the name to something generic versus overly specific?
• Whare are the structure requirements for this type?
• Can I simply use a tagging system to differentiate between similarly structured content?

The video includes the use of a mind map in creating a design.