Recently I had the privilege of working on the conversion of Novus Biological's website to Drupal 6, selling scientific supplies using Ubercart. I did this as a freelancer for the talented folks at SpireMedia, working with them as well as with fellow Vintage Digital member Ben Jeavons. It was a fantastically intense experience.
Ubercart's a great system out of the box, but there were a number of features on the site which made this implementation difficult.
- There were about 70,000 products, which is probably two or three orders of magnitude greater than the usual Ubercart site.
- The site needed to work with three currencies, and four prices, depending on the user's location or selection. Ubercart doesn't handle this well.
- The site needed to have two kinds of discounts - ones available to most any user, and ones only available to users who had bought the discount with userpoints.
I'll probably write about all of these in time, but at the moment I want to comment on that second item.
If you take a look at www.novusbio.com, or the image above, you'll see a bit of text in the upper right hand corner which says something like 'US site', or 'Europe Site', or 'Great Britain site', or 'World Site', with a little arrow next to it letting you change your region. We would start by pre-selecting a region for the user based on which IP they were browsing from, and then users could change it. If you go to a product page on Novus' site, you'll see different prices based on which of these are currently selected, as well as different currency signs. Since doing something like this is what some people would like to be able to do, I wanted to take a little time to go over how we did this.
I've been working with custom PHP MySQL apps for quite a few years. Early on I was building grant systems for nonprofit and State Arts Agencies in the United States. About 4 years ago, I fell into Drupal quite by accident at a little think tank that my then employer, The Western States Arts Federation, had organized in Vancouver. Several of the participants were employees of Bryght. I began to drink the cool aid.