From Ubercart to Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce is breaking new ground in Drupal based e-commerce development. In essence, Drupal Commerce is a rewrite of Ubercart's core systems by the former project lead and other major Drupal contributors based on our experience developing and building sites with Ubercart. Drupal Commerce leverages the greatest new features Drupal 7 has to offer to create a core set of e-commerce modules that are at the same time more solid internally and more flexible for the end user.

This session will introduce the basics of Drupal Commerce, including product creation and display, the shopping cart and flexible checkout workflow, and back-end order administration. For those already familiar with Ubercart, this session will demonstrate the evolution of features from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce and explain the upgrade / migration solutions in place.

Developers and site builders should take note of the following key goals of the Drupal Commerce project:

• Hard separation of the APIs from the UI.
• Core system development segregated from plugin module development and "packaging" concerns.
• Utilization of Drupal 7's core entity and fields systems for product and orders.
• More structured product entry and more flexible add to cart form display.
• Customizable checkout flow with tighter forms API integration.
• Stronger "lateral" integration with / dependence on other key contributed modules.
• Strictly enforced code and documentation standards.
• Improved internationalization with better address support and no more custom string override settings forms.
• ...

If you'd like to know more or lend a hand to the coding effort, check out the project homepage, stop by in #drupalcommerce on irc.freenode.net, or consider joining the contributors at a code sprint or DrupalCamp near you. You can also follow @drupalcommerce on Twitter.

We're pressing hard to meet the deadline for DrupalCon SF 2010 and will also keep this page updated as the conference draws nearer.