Drupal 7

There isn't really an out-of-the-box solution for gift certificates in Drupal Commerce; there's no module (at time of writing) you can simply download, enable and forget about. Being Drupal, there are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak, so in this post I'm going to outline how I got them working on a site I built.

Drupal 7’s block module can be a little limited in its permissions; “Administer Blocks” is a rather sweeping capability, and often it’s useful to be able to make it that bit more granular.

As has been commented elsewhere, when you’re programmatically inserting data the most reliable way of doing so is often to simulate form submission – that way, any validation rules are applied and other modules have a chance to intercept the submission to do what they need to with the data.

This was achieved using the function drupal_execute:

One of the nice, lesser-known features of Drupal 7 is the ability to use additional databases and switch at ease. This might be useful for external databases, or if you have another database in an alternative format – perhaps you have an SQLite database that for performance reasons, you don’t wish to migrate. (Yes, Drupal 7 now supports SQLite!)

The configuration can be a little confusing at first, so let’s look at a settings.php file set up to use two databases: drupal on Localhost, and db2 situated at db.example.com.