Shopping Cart

Submitted by vintom on May 15, 2008 - 3:57pm.

Ministry Technology Q&A

I use wordpress for most of my CMS work. But recently I have the need to add a shopping cart function. Wordpress if VERY limited in how to go about that. Any tips from G&G users?

I would consider switching to Drupal or Joomla if I thought it would help.

Thanks!

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Ubercart

Submitted by techmate on May 16, 2008 - 12:47am.

I havent used it myself so maybe someone else can jump in here. I do know there is a drupal module for this Ubercart

I <3 Ubercart

Submitted by micah on May 16, 2008 - 1:48am.

Okay, I realize I heart Ubercart is a little dorky, but it's been a long week, and I'm pretty tired.

I really do like it though. I had to choose between eCommerce and Ubercart in a real hurry back in February, and I don't regret my selection one bit.

But yeah, that would mean migrating from WordPress to Drupal. I've never used WordPress, but it's my understanding that it can get pretty limited in a hurry when you want to extend its functionality beyond blogs.

OTOH, depending on your needs, what about third-party hosting using something like cafepress.com or a similar service?

Micah

Ubercart vs. ECommerce

Submitted by Rob Feature on May 16, 2008 - 8:50am.

Over the past few years in my drupal installs, I've used e-commerce module 100% of the time. This past week, I lauched a production site using Ubercart. Here's my thoughts on the differences:

Ubercart's look and feel is much better than e-commerce...albiet possibly more confusing. Basically, the interface is really good, but there's SOOOO many configuration options that it's possibly overkill. But, all of these options give you incredible flexibility in the UI, so maybe it's a good thing.
The fact that e-commerce has been established for so long means that it does alot more custom things and interacts with other modules better than Ubercart does. There's just more people using it and creating modules for it. This means that, at this point, I'd probably only use Ubercart for basic shopping cart sites
The checkout in Ubercart rocks. Way more clear and makes more sense than e-commerce. This might be what sells me the most.
The ubercart community is confusing, though. If you look on Drupal.org it's hard to find many modules that work with Ubercart (as opposed to e-commerce), but if you go to the Ubercart site itself, it seems like there's a zillion half finished patches to do a zillion things...the point is, for a non über-geek, it's hard to tell what state the patches are in and how to download and install them to work with ubercart. So, at that point, they're really useless to me.

Those are just a few of my first impressions...hope it helps some people navigate these waters as I do it as well...

-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com

Nice rundown on the two.

Submitted by techmate on May 16, 2008 - 10:04am.

Nice rundown on the two. Thanks for posting this Bob.

Ubercart's Oddities

Submitted by micah on May 16, 2008 - 5:46pm.

Although I don't have experience with eCommerce, I pretty much agree with what you said about Ubercart.

It is very handy to run the Administration Menu Module on Ubercart sites, because it turns the whole /admin section into a nice - if not pretty - drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

It does help to read the documentation on their web site, which explains a lot, but not all, of the setup.

I was a little edgy at first about having everything on its own web site, too. Once I got into it, and read enough to be assured that they're committed to the Drupal community, that part stopped bothering me as much.

I had some problems migrating 700+ items from an existing Miva Merchant install into Ubercart, and got some excellent help on the Ubercart forums. Being able to import these items was a big part of my selection process.

I do think I would have preferred that they used the project module instead of discussion forums for bug tracking, but that's probably my own personal bent showing through. It is a bit difficult figuring out what is fixed and what is still an open issue. Then again, I see now that the issue queue for this module on Drupal.org is pretty active. Having things in two places does make things rather confusing.

From the looks of his blog, it appears that at least one of Ubercart's lead developers, Ryan Szrama, is a Christian. Maybe you guys can interview him on the podcast some time.

Micah

Makes me glad... : )

Submitted by Ryan on May 17, 2008 - 11:16am.

Makes me glad to see you guys are finding Ubercart useful! Thanks for the kind words and honest critique. Sorry the straddling the fence thing is so confusing... I imagine it's worst for those with a longer history in the Drupal community. We're trying to put notices up on the site for folks to move any actual, working modules into the Drupal.org project system (Lyle and I have done that recently for several of our own non-core modules) and use the project tracking there.

Our intention was to lower the barrier to entry for feedback and development while avoiding the difficulties of the osC forums, but it's been difficult. ; ) I think doing away with the Issue Tracker on u.o would be a good start, and I'm open to more discussion in the site improvement forum. We're getting a lot of non-Drupalers coming to Ubercart (thanks to some solid search engine rankings on just about any e-commerce keyword), so maybe some tutorials on digging into the community and taking advantage of Drupal on a larger scale would be helpful. It just all takes time. : (

I'd be happy to chat more about the project itself, but on a personal note, Lyle and I (along with several others at work) are both believers. It's nice to have so many brothers (one of whom is a pastor in my church) in the office and in the Drupal community at large. : )

Ciao,
-Ryan