townx

Yesterday a new ecommerce module for Drupal, Ubercart, was announced. This is pretty exciting. I'd looked at the existing Drupal ecommerce module before, but it's a bit of a mess, cobbled together from what seemed to be endless disparate modules that half work together. (Not to belittle the achievements of the team which produced the ecommerce module: it has masses of functionality, and integration with all sorts of stuff; but it's too complex for normal people who just want to sell books or something.)

What marks out Ubercart?

• Nice documentation. It looks like the development company behind it has actually written a professional, clear, comprehensive set of manuals for it. This makes the world of difference to how easy a product is to use.
• Support for anonymous checkout. Users new to the site can be gently guided through checkout without having to create an account before they can do anything. The explanation of scenarios this encompasses is thorough and well thought through.
• The system looks modular and well designed. You can just load up the parts of the framework you need, and the dependencies and features of each are properly explained.
• The developer's guide is clear, concise and gives you a decent number of examples of the API (hooks), variables available to templates, etc.. They've even gone to the trouble of providing a coding standards guide, and a list of useful open source applications you can employ to start doing your own development.
• Because it's based on Drupal, and Drupal has a whole slew of modules (including CRM), Ubercart increases the potential of Drupal as a simple, extensible, general-purpose business framework. Imagine if your online shop and your CRM could easily share customer data...

The only issue I'm not clear on (probably somewhere in the documentation) is whether you could use it to build a electronic downloads site (e.g. to sell images or PDFs). I'm sure other stuff will crop up too (like currency handling).

This is a really exciting project, and is the kind of thing that could give Drupal a big boost as a general purpose web framework. It definitely looks like it could give osCommerce a kick up the arse. It's actually a joy to read the well-written, clear documentation (there are a few areas where it's incomplete, but generally it's pretty comprehensive). I've added it to my todo list of products to have a look at within the next month, and hopefully I'll end up using it myself (eventually).

Congratulations to the team, and I wish them the best of luck in getting it off the ground.