Clarifying Ubercart and Ecommerce

In the past few weeks I've had people ask me more about my position on ubercart and ecommerce. Probably due to Stephanie's post about ubercart in her blog. Anywho, I'm creating this post to update what I've observed as an outsider, developing on ubercart and the movements being done to address concerns in my previous blog post.

1) Ubercart development process
I still believe work needs to be done in this field. Case in point: Ubercart 1.4
http://www.ubercart.org/news/sep-17-2008/ubercart_14_released
If you compare this to drupal development, you'd never see these type of issues when updating drupal 5.9 to 5.10. Why? because they have a good case tracker, people do bug testing on HEAD before it gets released, and most importantly NO FEATURE changes! Ubercart 1.5 is planned to be released this week to fix issues caused in 1.4. If this was drupal development, 1.4 would have never been released, instead these issues would be tested first on head and released properly.

That said, there is some good work being done to make the software better, and for many users ubercart does what they need. They're getting features built and released, keeping the community happy.

Another big plus to the ubercart devs: Features are starting to be rolled into the 6.x version, and not 1.0. I think we'll start seeing a 'real' stable version of ubercart soon.

2) Ubercart vs Ec.. which one?
I'm recommending ubercart to most users. It has the most complete system out there. It might be monolithic, but until eC is able to bring a similar UI, ubercart is where its at. However, if you're looking for a framework for your own ecommerce solution, or you only need a few ecommerce functions, the eC package may work better for you.

3) Drupal community interaction
Its looking like Ubercart will end up splintering the drupal community whether I or others like it or not. People doing ecommerce usually flock to ubercart.org and aren't seen in #drupal as much. People who develop on d.o aren't 'ever' seen in ubercart.org's page.
However, things are starting to change here as well. Issues are being tracked in the d.o issue tracker, and CVS is starting to be used more in conjunction with bzr. Although there is still work to be done here. More beginner conversations are taking place on d.o regarding ecommerce, and are being answered here.

So in summary: Use ubercart, but there are some things to watch for. Upgrading ubercart is not as simple as drupal, because of the changes made between 'stable' versions. The dev team is supportive and understands the fundamentals of ecommerce, although they still need to learn more about software and large project design. There are many companies using ubercart. If you know the pitfalls and can work around them, it'll work great for you.

Open Source Development and how NOT to do it

I'll admit: I'm part of the problem. I develop for ubercart, which is a fork of ecommerce. More about this later. But onto the soap-opera-drama in IRC this morning.

This has to do with yet another module that rszrama has decided to make on his own PM_lite, without any research of the APIs regarding privatemsg. Lets read the conversation....

IRC convo via pastebin: http://pastebin.com/f7a53b21a

So thats the recent drama. I'm not sure if the coding wombat's team have college certs or not (not saying that programmers need to have degrees per-se, but it helps) but thier complete lack of research, critical thinking, willingness to work with others (rather than having others work for him), all on top of a lack of basic software design ideas, and on top of that -- the fact that they think they're right and anything said to them is in-one-ear and out the other, is just sad.

Now that said, I started contributing to the ubercart project because last summer it appeared that drupal-ecommerce was dead. Hindsight is 20/20, but I needed an ecommerce package that worked and ubercart had the UI to get it done. That said, ubercart isn't going away anytime soon, and nor is my support for it. the ECv4 package has gone in a different direction: instead of being an out-of-box solution, its a framework for building eCommerce solutions on drupal. Its not for the faint of heart, and will require php/dev experience to work well, unlike ubercart. I think there is a lot of cleanup in ECv4 that could make it feature equivalent, but would probably never have the UI.

My eventual hope would be to see ubercart and ecommerce merge as one ecommerce package, and if they want to brand ubercart as a supported distro of ecommerce, great. They can share common payment, shipping, product, etc apis and add their own custom modules on top of that. This would bring harmony to ecommerce in drupal. I think I'll focus my efforts here, and who knows -- perhaps if others join on, we can make this happen.

But for now, ubercart is where I'm at. For such a dysfunctional group, the package seems to work fairly well. I'd like to see some good developers join on this effort, but as long as these 'wombats' are in command, it'll never happen. Stay tuned...