ubercart

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.

There it was in front of my eyes.  The headline in osCommerce's forum read, "Is OsC Dead?, Discussion of the Progress of OsC" [link removed by osCommerce folks?].  Despite how some may read the title, the thread isn't about bashing osCommerce.  Instead, it is about users and community members concerned and even fearful of the slow pace of new development for osCommerce.  Despite all the talk about osCommerce 3.0, it has been a year and a half since OsC 3 Alpha 4 was released with the roadmap showing that Alpha 5 and 6 are still under development.  How can one not ask if the future of osCommerce is in jeopardy?

As mentioned at the osCommerce forum, Kerry Watson also has an article out about the new breed of open source shopping carts.  The article starts off with a that was then, this is now statement regarding shopping carts.

While the Big Three of the old guard — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — continue to duke it out among themselves, new-generation open source commerce projects have begun to spring up with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Most noteworthy of the new crop are France-based Prestashop and US-based programs Ubercart and Magento.

These fresh Web 2.0-style carts are mature and production-ready contenders, and all are at or beyond version 1.0 in their production cycle. These carts are equal or superior to many commercial e-commerce programs, and are available for free under the GNU or OSL 3.0 Public License. We've previously reviewed Magento, so this column will focus on the other two next-generation carts: PrestaShop and Ubercart.

Personally, I've been working on recommending a friend to upgrade his osCommerce site to either Magento or Drupal's Ubercart.  Even when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released, it will likely still not have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of shopping carts currently have now.  It's not that I think osCommerce is dead, but I do think that osCommerce has stopped evolving.  Good open source projects never die, they just fade away.

The release of Ubercart 1.0 was announced earlier today.  Ubercart is an open source e-commerce package (shopping cart) that fully integrates your online store with the open source CMS, Drupal.  We've been watching Ubercart for some time and like some of the look-and-feel it borrows from osCommerce.

Some of the features in Ubercart 1.0 as reported by their shopping cart's Website include:

• Configurable product catalog includes catalog pages and a block to display product categories.
• Flexible product creation system. Create normal products by default. Add fields to store additional product information using Drupal's CCK system.
• Flexible product attributes system. Create user selectable attributes for your products that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items as the customer adds them to his or her cart. Set default attribute/option sets for each product class to easily create many similar products.

In 2006, I helped bring a friend's Fish and Tackle store online using open source osCommerce. The project was ugly in both appearance and code as I was merging a legacy site with an SMF forum together with the osCommerce software. As I indicated back then, while osCommerce was functional I was not pleased with the software. I kept on thinking how much easier this project would have been if I had used what I consider as modern CMS's. Specifically, I was thinking Drupal and perhaps even Joomla!.

I have slowly learned in the past few years that merging applications, applications never meant to be merged together, never really results in a good project. I knew even then I never really wanted to try bridging osCommerce, SMF, and Drupal into a single site. Yes, you can end with something fully functional and even pleasant to the eye, but as the site's Web developer you always have this nagging feeling that something is missing and you could have done better. If I had to do the fishing site over again and decided on using Drupal, I would only consider the eCommerce module for Drupal or Ubercart.

Now that you know where I stand on the issue of bridging applications with fully functional CMS, I was surprised to read a recent and bold post at All Drupal Themes regarding the bridging of Drupal and the Magento shopping carts together.

One of the things I like about browsing the Web for posts on various CMS topics is that they always seem to show up on the Web when when I need them the most.  For example, I'm starting to consider whether I'll continue to use osCommerce for some sites that I manage.  While the yet to be released osCommerce 3.0 will likely be an option next year, I'm open to other possibilities.  What I would like to see is a shopping cart that integrates well with a full CMS.  In the past, I've found Joomla's Virtuemart extension and Drupal's e-Commerce module to fall just short of the client's needs so I've stuck with pure shopping carts such as osCommerce.  Yet, I still keep on hoping for better open source options.

A new shopping cart module for Drupal, Ubercart, is hot under development and attempts to address the short-comings of the Drupal e-Commerce module.  Ubercart's roots comes from people like you and me who wouldn't mind moving the client from osCommerce over to Drupal.  In fact, some of the user interface in Ubercart is very similar to that found in osCommerce (check screenshots), which is a good thing for clients to experience during a migration from one application to the next.  Ubercart is still under alpha development, but if you've followed osCommerce's long software development cycle the terms alpha, beta, and release candidate are not terms that will scare you off from taking a look at Ubercart.