We've finally launched the content area of the PurPur site to add to the original shopping section - and about time too!

The original vision for the PurPur site, well over a year ago, was to have a large area of information and advice to demonstrate expertise & knowledge to potential customers, build the relationship and so on.

Life has intervened, and it's taken for ever to finally get off our butts and write & build it, but we finally did, thank goodness.

Fortunately, Tara's original design and HTML/CSS for the shopping site worked very well in Drupal (our chosen CMS), which made the construction easy.

To be safe, and to provide a safe playground for experimentation, we set up a test Drupal instance on our home server, which also let me choose, evaluate and test the configuration of a sensible module set.

Cheers also to GC who hosts the PurPur site, and has the Drupal smarts to be able to help out when I got totally lost.

Other Stuff

1. The shopping site now has an RSS feed which is used to syndicate over the new products from Zencart to Drupal (they're on the same box, but run as separate applications).
2. I taught myself rather more SOAP SQL and PHP than I wanted to integrate the Shopping Cart (running on ZenCart) and our CRM application (running on SugarCRM on a different server). Whenever anyone registers on the Shopping Cart, they now pop up as a contact in Sugar, with email permissions intact. We're now running our email newsletter from Sugar, so you can see the benefit.
3. Coming soon - people will be able to request a visit from a consultant by filling in a form on the main site - again, this populates Sugar, which is what the consultants use.
4. Also coming soon, PurPur Associates...