Talking Drupal #422 - Commerce Kickstart

Today we are talking about Commerce Kickstart, Commerce in General, and What’s new at Centarro with guest Ryan Szrama. We’ll also cover Navigation as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
www.talkingDrupal.com/422

Topics

• High level overview of commerce kickstart
• Is it a distribution
• Will it move to recipes
• Why use commerce directly over kickstart
• Does kickstart lend itself to a specific type of site
• Compare with Shopify
• Do you ever recommend Shopify
• Are there additional conditions or events being added
• Can people contribute to kickstart
• What is Centarro focused on now
• What is the state of headless

Resources

• Selling File Downloads and certificates through Drupal Commerce
• Commerce Kickstart
• Driesnote
• Methodical coffee

Guests

Ryan Szarma - ryanszrama.com rszrama

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Mark Casias - kanopi.com - markie

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu
Navigation

• Brief description:
  • Would you like to try out and give feedback on a proposed overhaul to how Drupal’s administration menu works? There’s a module for that.
• Brief history
  • How old: project created in 2004, but the namespace was taken over earlier this year as a place to work on the proposed new navigation in the contrib space
  • Versions available: No releases yet, so you need to clone the repo into your custom modules
• Maintainership
  • Very active development, commits in the past day
• Number of open issues:
  • 46, 14 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • Officially 1 site is using it, but not recommended for production anyway
• Maintainer(s):
  • Include Christina Chumillas, Sascha Eggenberger, Lauri Eskola, Mike Herschel, and more
• Module features and usage
  • At this point, really a prototype, trying to define what the user experience should be
  • Worth noting that the latest release for the Gin admin theme also includes this new updated navigation as an experimental feature that can be updated, but still best to leave feedback on the Navigation project
  • The main idea is that instead of having dropdowns that fly out for deeper level menu items, the navigation is in a sidebar, with menu items that expand to reveal child items when clicked
  • It’s worth noting that dropdown menus with multiple levels handled in flyouts are a known usability pain point, and are often cited by industry experts like Jakob Neilsen as something to avoid
  • There are still some usability issues to be thought through with this approach, for example there is no longer a way to reach the top page of a section or subsection, because clicking on the link shows or hides the child items instead
  • This was a subject of some very active discussions at DrupalCon Europe last week, so I thought it would be good to cover this week, so our listeners can add their voices