Have you tried drinking only natural wines?

I was first approached to con­sult on the Nat­ur­al Wine Com­pa­ny web­site three years ago when the busi­ness plan was just a twin­kle in the founders’ eyes. They had no logo, no loca­tion, just a dream. It took some time and a lot of hard work to get things togeth­er, but this year the dream became real­i­ty. The brick and mor­tar Nat­ur­al Wine Com­pa­ny store opened in Brook­lyn the Sat­ur­day before Thanks­giv­ing and the web­site was launched concurrently.

Nat­ur­al wines—wines of any kind, really—are out­side my area of knowl­edge, but there’s a very amus­ing video on Youtube that humor­ous­ly (and with unnec­es­sar­i­ly strong lan­guage) explains what the big deal is—and isn’t. It seems true that peo­ple have been mak­ing a big deal out of some­thing that is very poor­ly defined, but under­neath there’s some­thing to it. Wines made with sus­tain­able farm­ing tech­niques are prefer­able for obvi­ous rea­sons; organ­ic wines, like oth­er organ­ic foods are often more whole­some and almost always made with a greater ded­i­ca­tion to craft; bio­dy­nam­ic farm­ing meth­ods go beyond sustainable.

If I try to say any more about wine it will be real­ly obvi­ous how lit­tle I know, so I’ll leave the read­er to do her or his own research. From my per­spec­tive, these are some great peo­ple doing some­thing excit­ing and I’m glad to be a part of the project even though I’m not an œnophile.

The great­est chal­lenge with this project was the data source require­ment. The site gets all its prod­uct infor­ma­tion from the store’s inven­to­ry data­base, run­ning on File­Mak­er­Pro on a serv­er oth­er than the web­serv­er, and I over­es­ti­mat­ed the tools avail­able to Dru­pal off the shelf for inte­gra­tion with for­eign data integration.

To be sure, there are many options for get­ting data into Dru­pal from the out­side world. There is a fledg­ling File­Mak­er import mod­ule (which the devel­op­er has­n’t yet got­ten into drupal.org’s CVS repos­i­to­ry) but prob­a­bly due to my igno­rance of File­Mak­er I was nev­er able to so much as con­nect to the remote File­Mak­er data­base with the mod­ule. Instead we pack­age up a feed and upload it to the Dru­pal serv­er on a reg­u­lar basis.

There are a num­ber of ways to get feed data into Dru­pal, all of which work well by them­selves, but the trick was to find a feed mod­ule that would update exist­ing records, run reg­u­lar­ly, han­dle nest­ed tax­on­o­my vocab­u­lar­ies, and have access to both CCK fields and fields cre­at­ed by the Uber­cart module.

After start­ing with writ­ing a cus­tom mod­ule for the import, I switched first to the Node Import mod­ule, then to the Feeds mod­ule when I found that Node Import won’t import and update—only update. Feeds, it turns out, does­n’t actu­al­ly import and update. It will delete the old node auto­mat­i­cal­ly and cre­ate a new one. That’s sort of fine unless you ever want to do any­thing with those nodes again, like track who ordered a par­tic­u­lar wine. That’s impos­si­ble to do when the wine was delet­ed in order to cor­rect a spelling error. 

So I went back to Node Import, now armed with Node Import Update. It seems I’m not the only one who might want to update data reg­u­lar­ly and auto­mat­i­cal­ly. The main­tain­er of Node Import does­n’t seem to think so, but that’s what add-on mod­ules to add-on mod­ules were invent­ed for, right? But Node Import Update does­n’t read Uber­cart fields—or did­n’t until I wrote a patch to make it hap­pen. Well, writ­ing a patch is a lot eas­i­er than writ­ing the whole thing from scratch.

When I first spec’d the project out I hoped I might be able to use Dru­pal 7 to start from scratch, but at the start nei­ther Dru­pal 7 nor the col­lec­tion of mod­ules was ready in time for this project. Dru­pal 7’s release, by the way, is sched­uled Jan­u­ary 5^th. As much as I like Uber­cart I think I’ll be pleased to leave Uber­cart in favor of Dru­pal Com­merce, which is being devel­oped by many of the folks respon­si­ble for Uber­cart. Some­times you’ve got to start over in order to do things right, and I like what I’ve been hear­ing about Dru­pal Commerce.

Some projects give truth to the old saw that «when you’re 90% done you’re half way there.» The Nat­ur­al Wine Com­pa­ny site was one of them. I had trou­ble with scope creep, and there are still fea­tures I’m champ­ing at the bit to start on but which were out­side the scope of this phase of the project. If I’d tried to shoe­horn in every fea­ture I want to add, the site might have launched some­time in 2017 and I would have starved.

Some of this is endem­ic to work­ing with a con­tent man­age­ment plat­form like Dru­pal. It’s easy to sit back and say, «wow! it’ll do a cal­en­dar and a forum and a store and a social media plat­form and a con­tact man­ag­er! Look at all those mod­ules!» but the real­i­ty is that some mod­ules are incom­plete and even the ones that are com­plete were designed with some­one else’s use-case. So in a few hours it’s pos­si­ble to have 90% of every­thing a client needs, and then the last item is some­thing like, «must pro­duce Visio files» and that takes a month to build. When you’re 90% done, you’re 10% there is clos­er to reality.

I’m pleased with the site as it is but there is a lot more that can be done. So for my friends, casu­al acquain­tances, busi­ness asso­ciates, and anony­mous read­ers who drink wine, I high­ly rec­om­mend nat­ur­al wines.

As a post­script, I want to extend my grat­i­tude to the folks at Google who devel­oped the Chrome brows­er. As I fin­ished up this arti­cle I went back to replace the let­ters o and e with the lig­a­ture œ, which on the Mac­in­tosh is done with the key­stroke com­bi­na­tion option‑q. Which is only one key away from command‑q. The «reopen closed tab» fea­ture saved me from rewrit­ing about 500 words. Fire­fox has this fea­ture too, but tonight it’s Chrome I’m thanking.