Drupal e-Commerce

For a business man, information about how is going the sales, profit is vital. e-Commerce 1, 2 and 3 series lacked to provide a page that centralizes all useful information about the business. In fact, it lacked about generate useful information at all. People were relying on third party solutions to monitor their sites, like Google Analytics.

Widgets

e-Commerce 4 comes with the Overview Widgets to provide a complete understanding about the whole website. The store module provides some tables, while the eC Dashboards can display beautiful charts.

Amoung the current and future features regarding these widgets, se can say:

• Each and every widget have a unique access permission. You can forbid some roles to see a given information. (marketing VP can see marketing performance while all operational informations and charts will be hidden)
• An API that allow contrib modules to extend the widgets.
• (not yet implemented) Each user may choose what widgets he/she want to see. Its somewhat similar to iGoogle or My Yahoo pages.
• (not yet implemented) Micro options-form for each widget.

How to implement a Widgets

You can create a module that provides more widgets or even create a patch to store.module or eC Dashboards creating more useful widgets. First, lets create our first widget: