Install Ubercart in Drupal 7
Ubercart is in beta at the time of the writing, but I have been able to run several live stores without glitches using Ubercart and Drupal 7. There are a couple of minor tweaks you will need to make, but you can have a production online store with the latest technology out there. Since this is the first module we will be installing in this tutorial, we need to cover module installation and dependencies in Drupal 7.
Module Dependencies
You won't have any success installing a module unless all of its dependencies are met. There are two good ways to tell what modules that a Drupal module is dependent on.
- Check the module download page. This appears on the download page for Ubercart:
- Look in the Modules area of Drupal. We won't be doing this since we have not yet installed Ubercart.
Before we move on, let's satisfy all of the dependencies for installing Ubercart. We have several modules we need to download:
There really is no need to know what any of these do. Most of these modules are application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers to reduce the amount of code they have to write to introduce new modules to Drupal. All of the module installations follow the same procedure except for the Colorbox module. Its installation will be discussed seperately.
Let's start by installing the Rules module. Click the link for the Rules project page (in the list above). We have several choices of version that we can download and install:
Look for the latest stable version (in green). In the case of the picture above, it is version 7.x-2.0-beta1. Under the downloads column in the row for the most stable version, right click where it says "tar.gz" and save the link location. Now we are ready to install the module.
Go to your Drupal 7 Site and sign in with the administrator account. On the top menu, click "Modules". Then find the link slightly down the page that says + Install new module. See the screenshot below if you are having trouble finding this.
This will bring you to a new screen that asks you the location of the module you would like to install. There are two options, Install from a URL and Upload a module or theme archive to install. This tutorial uses the former method, but if you want to download and then upload the files, that works as well. In the textbox, paste the address to the .tar.gz file that we copied in the last step. Click "Install" and Drupal will download the files and get them ready for full installation.
Now that the module is preloaded in your system, it is time to move on to the next dependency. You may have to provide FTP login information. Go ahead and provide your FTP account and it should run without a glitch. To easily arrive back at the Modules page, just click the "Enable new modules" link after dependency. Do this for every dependency in the list above. When you are finished, it is then time to install Ubercart the same way.
The download page for Ubercart is http://drupal.org/project/ubercart. Remember, choose the latest stable version and install using the process just mentioned.
Remember I mentioned earlier that Colorbox installs a little bit differently? Before we move on, let's finish getting the files we need for Colorbox. Colorbox requires a library that can be downloaded from here. Download the contents of the file and then use ftp to extract them in WEBROOT/sites/all/libraries. That's all you have to do differently to make Colorbox work.
Its now time to enable all of these new modules that we have semi-installed. Go back to the "Modules" area by clicking on the toolbar at the top. Scroll down to the fieldset call "UBERCART CORE". Click all of the boxes in the column "Enable".
These are the absolute minimum modules you need to have an online store. Go through all of the Ubercart-Core (optional), Ubercart-Extra, Ubercart-Fulfillment, and Ubercart-Payment modules and select the ones you think you need for your business. When you are finished reading and selecting the additional modules, click "Save Configuration" on the very bottom of the screen.
Drupal will then ask you if you want to install the dependencies. Say yes and Ouila, Ubercart is now installed.
One last thing, I found a glitch with the checkout procedure with Ubercart for Drupal 7, but I fixed it. I'm not sure if it has been fixed in the official Drupal releases, but I wrote a blog about fixing it. You should run a couple test transactions and if it doesn't work, give this fix a try.