Talking Drupal #422 - Commerce Kickstart

Oct 30, 2023

Guest Ryan Szrama, co-founder of Centarro and commerce expert, talks about Commerce Kickstart, the state of headless commerce in Drupal, and what's new at Centarro. They also discuss the Navigation module and its proposed overhaul to Drupal's administration menu.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Selling Hot Dogs through E-commerce and Drupal Experience

01:42 • 2min

Introduction, Navigation module, and DrupalCon discussions

04:05 • 7min

Exploring Commerce Kickstart: A Fast and Easy Way to Begin Building on Drupal Commerce

11:02 • 14min

Comparing Drupal Commerce and Commerce Kickstart

25:26 • 29min

The State of Headless Commerce in Drupal Commerce

54:37 • 10min

Drupal Marketing Initiative & Connecting with the Talking Drupal Community

01:04:36 • 4min

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

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