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DrupalCon San Francisco 2010

shopping cart

Drupal's Ubercart forks into Drupal Commerce

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By Bryan - Posted on 15 January 2010

A few years ago, I had developed an online store for a buddy of mine using osCommerce. I had hoped to use Joomla! or Drupal for the site but at the time wasn't satisfied with the shopping cart extensions or modules that were available for either CMS. Shortly after developing that site a new eCommerce module for Drupal became available called Ubercart. I've never had taken on the task of building another online store (it was a lot of work) but I've always kept my eye on Ubercart just to stay informed.

Ryan Szrama who has been the project lead of Ubercart from its beginning posted yesterday that Ubercart will fork into Drupal Commerce. At this time it is now known what will become of Ubercart. Ryan writes:

A rose by any other name is still a rose, and Ubercore by any other name is still the best thing to happen for Drupal based e-commerce since the advent of Ubercart. For at least the foreseeable future, Ubercore will continue as Drupal Commerce, managed similarly to Drupal itself. We'll be working our tails off to make sure e-commerce on Drupal 7 shows just how awesome having fields in core can be.

As often happens in open source, the trademark owner and some of Ubercart's developers are in disagreement with the direction Ubercart should take in new development. Luckily, for Ryan and the developers of the new project, Ubercart is under the open source GPL license which allows them to use all of source code for Drupal Commerce. This should be an interesting story to follow in the world of open source CMS.

Video on Magento Enterprise Edition 1.6

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By Bryan - Posted on 29 November 2009

There are very few shopping carts or ecommerce platforms that I'm willing to talk about on a blog for content management systems. For whatever reason, I have always had interest in the Magento Ecommerce platform. The following is a video on the features included in the Magento Enterprise Edition 1.6.

Discovering Mixergy with Magento

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By Bryan - Posted on 26 June 2009

Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

E Commerce Solutions Services – For Growth of Online Business

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By kethywright - Posted on 23 June 2009

Greater numbers of people all over the world have started exploring the internet business transactions. E-commerce websites have become increasingly common on internet. Professional e commerce website developing companies use the latest technologies to develop e commerce solutions for their clients. One can get customized services from his e commerce solution provider that best suit his online business requirements. In order to get the maximum benefit out from online business the website needs to consider few most critical concepts. First is effective products services and second one is secured payment methods and most importantly outstanding customer communication and support. Products as well as services can be presented and sold on an e commerce websites.

E-commerce website development works well for both B2B and B2C websites, and greatly increase profit margins. These online options enable rapid business construction, and allows for feedback about the number of visitors coming to an online store. It facilitates in keeping and maintaining proper records in a database. The use of graphic, flash, multimedia gives real shopping experience to the customers. Make sure which ever elements one use for the e-commerce website design do not take much time to download. If downloads of e commerce website is not faster then customer may loose interest and switch to another website. E-commerce websites are efficient and paperless medium for many business transactions.  

Creating an Online Store with new Magento book

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By jude dsouza - Posted on 11 May 2009

Magento: Beginners Guide is a new book from Packt that walks users through building an online store using the Magento open-source e-commerce solution. Written by William Rice, Magento Beginners Guide focuses on the key features of Magento to setup a unique online store and customize its appearance with the help of examples.

Magento is the world's most evolved e-commerce solution and runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, users can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento's templates and themes enable users to customize the look and feel of their store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable them to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services.

This book follows a step-by-step approach teaching users to install and configure Magento, and add products to their online catalog. To help customers navigate their online store, the reader will learn to create categories and attributes to build their catalog of products and enhance it with descriptions, images, and inventory information.

Users will be able to present and sell products in groups and sets, and can offer discounts based on quantities along with accepting payments using PayPal, credit cards, and checks/money orders while offering a variety of shipping options. Along with connecting to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS they will learn to apply sales tax rules to different shipping addresses and different types of products, thus creating customized shipping rates.

Build an Online Store with Joomla E-Commerce and VirtueMart

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By Neha Shaikh - Posted on 22 April 2009

Joomla! E-Commerce with VirtueMart is a new book from Packt that helps users to build their own Joomla VirtueMart e-commerce web site with Joomla! 1.0/1.5 and VirtueMart 1.1.x. Written by Suhreed Sarkar, this book guides users through installing and configuring a VirtueMart store using the Joomla CMS platform.

Readers will learn to configure their stores with the most essential shop functionality such as creating and using the appropriate zones and currencies, configure payment methods, shipping methods, and taxes. In addition to this, users will be able to manage manufacturers, vendors, products, and product categories.

When free is not enough: The Magento Enterprise Edition

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By Bryan - Posted on 20 April 2009

Magento Enterprise EditionLast week, Varien and Magento announced an alternative to the community open source Magento ecommerce platform.  That alternative is Magento Enterprise Edition.

Today marks a major milestone for Varien and Magento with the release of the Magento Enterprise Edition. The product is a culmination of months of work and countless feedback from our community, partners and customers. The commercially licensed Magento Enterprise Edition software is the premium grade Magento product. It is geared towards larger companies and includes additional features, including ROI specific features, not available in our open source, Community Edition product. In addition to features, our Enterprise Edition will include SLA based support with guaranteed response times, warranties, indemnification and soon, PA-DSS certification. Learn more about the Enterprise Edition product and compare product editions.

With the launch of our Enterprise Edition, it is important to note our commitment to the open source, Community Edition product. The release of the Magento Enterprise Edition aids us by allowing us to focus on the distinct groups of Magento users, small or large, and to engage each according to their needs, and now, contribute more time and resources to the success of each. More information regarding our community and open source initiatives is detailed below.

For those that are used to getting open source Magento for "free", the starting price of $8,900 USD for the Enterprise Edition may be a little shocking.  However, it's important to note that the Enterprise edition isn't geared toward those smaller "mom and pop" online stores.  Instead the Magento Enterprise edition is intended for those larger corporations that want guarantees in the products they purchase including warranty, indemnification, and full product support via an SLA.

What else does the $8,900 or more give you that the Community Edition (without extensions) doesn't give you?  Some of the additional benefits of the Enterprise Edition over the Community Edition include:

  • Advanced Administrator Roles and Permission Restriction per Site (Website and Store View)
  • Logging of Administrator Actions
  • Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
  • Customer Store Credits
  • Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
  • Limited Catalog Access. Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group
  • Private Club Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
  • Strong Data Encryption

Apparently, the introduction of the Enterprise Edition does not mean there will be less support and development for the Community Edition of Magento.  In fact since the announcement of the Enterprise Edition, version 1.3.1 of Magento Community has been released.