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.