Ryan Szrama

I had a great time last weekend taking part in DrupalCamp Austin as a learner, a helper, and a presenter. I also enjoyed sharing an apartment and eating meat (and/or ice cream ) with my fellow Commerce Guys, Mike and Tim, and it was doubly fun to get reacquainted with folks I hadn't seen since last year's Drupalcon Szeged or Do It With Drupal.

As a learner at Drupal events, I tend to benefit most from sessions that discuss meta issues in Drupal development... how to grow your community or business, interact with clients, deploy and manage sites in the wild, etc. Ben Finklea of Volacci didn't disappoint with the weekend's opening keynote session, Building a Successful Drupal Business. He focused a lot on building good business processes for tasks ranging from managing sales leads to hiring. I missed out on Ben's SEO chat later but actually had the pleasure of joining him for church on Sunday morning, a rare opportunity on a Drupal weekend!

As a helper, I had fun doing a little bit of Drupal / Ubercart triage in the Commerce Guys room. Myself and a few other experienced Drupallers fielded questions and offered site building advice to various folks looking to iron out issues with their latest sites and prepare for upcoming projects. Aside from the communal eating of meat and ice cream (see above... and below), this is probably my favorite part of Drupal events.

Last, as a presenter I walked through the installation and configuration of Ubercart starting with the UberDrupal installation profile. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done and helped folks in the audience visualize how to use the sweet Acquia Prosper theme and leverage Ubercart's core systems. I was scheduled to discuss the ongoing Ubercore Initiative the next day, but most in the crowd were there because they had chosen Panels over Ubercart the day before. So, with a slight adjustment, I presented another Ubercart overview with glimpses of the plans for future development (like those in my last post on products). Those interested in learning more than that session afforded should hop in the #d7uc IRC meeting scheduled for Nov. 20 at 1 PM EST and keep an eye on http://d7uc.org.

On the recommendation of Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens, I drove the rental with Mike and Tim down to Driftwood, TX (nowhere near a beach) for some Salt Lick BBQ. They brought us plates piled with meat fresh from the open fire pit, treating our taste buds through our yummiest business planning meeting ever. Here's hoping there's a trip to Austin (for Drupal and/or BBQ) in my future!

This is the second in a series of posts outlining the ideas driving the Ubercore Initiative forward. We've had a lot of positive feedback from developers eager to dig into Drupal 7 to re-implement Ubercart's features like the awesome vision of products outlined below.

For starters, when we gathered for the Ubercore planning sprint in San Francisco, we began by nailing down the core systems without which we wouldn't have an e-commerce system and which we needed to build out other essential features. The links above are our whiteboard scribblings based on Ubercart's current features, but the one we gave the most time to was the core product system. The resultant notes and discussion summarized in this post may be viewed here.

In short... it's gonna be awesome, and it's all thanks to Drupal 7's Fields API. Products are already great in Ubercart, but as one person recently tweeted, the implementation thus far has been a little awkward. Furthermore, from a data standpoint, it's been quite limiting.

How about a visual? It's my first go at Omnigraffle...

Currently, Ubercart defines a new product node type on install and gives you the opportunity to clone multiple new product node types called "product classes." These can then have default attributes assigned to them, which are customer selectable alterations to products at the point of purchase. For example, your merchandise store can have a t-shirt product class with a size attribute attached to it that your customers choose when adding the shirt to the cart. Each of these attributes can result in a price, weight, or SKU adjustment as well. There are also multiple product types defined at the module level, so that regular products function differently from product kits, each having their own add to cart form and functionality in the cart.

Problems come in you try to define just what a product is. Is it a node? Well, with SKU adjustments, aren't more than one products visible on a single node? How does Ubercart know those altered SKUs exist? There are implications here adversely affecting the development of stock control systems, sales and product reports, the shopping cart and order product handling, representing non-tangible products, and more. Happily, we have a plan we think will address these shortcomings without losing any of our current features.

So, what is the future of products? As fago hinted in his post, the future of products is entities, not nodes. We're separating "what a product is" from "how a product is displayed" and making products themselves top level, fieldable entities. Thanks to bundles, we'll still have multiple product types with various attributes, but instead of the current system where attributes are very loosely defined, we'll be moving more toward a product database where each individual product is defined and described by fields you add. Whereas before you might have had a single t-shirt product node with three variations thanks to a size attribute, you would now define a t-shirt product bundle and enter in the three variations with their SKUs and sizes set.

To handle product display, we'll be using a field that lets you specify which products to show on whatever the field is attached to (like a product display node) and how to prepare them for display. The products selected might all be listed individually for the user to select from a radio list. They might be grouped on their size field so that a size select list appears on the add to cart form as it does now. They might be sold all together at a set price as a product kit. We want this product display field to be flexible and to correct the difficulties people have in working with the current add to cart form.

This approach will clarify what a product is (a bundle of fields, including at least a SKU and a default title / price) and provide greater flexibility in how it is displayed (contributed field formatters, anyone?). Modules working with the product system, like stock control modules, will now have a unique product ID to refer to instead of a node ID with an array of attribute selections. We'll have better Views integration and end up with a product entry field that could attach an add to cart form to any entity.

Honestly, I could go on, but I'll stop here. This is already more gushing than I was planning to include in a single post. If you want to read more, hear what other people are thinking, and provide some feedback, you can check out the brainstorming thread, comment here, or keep an eye on the fieldable product meta issue as we flesh out the development tasks.

If you want to help make it happen, don't be shy.

Top Notch Themes released the first beta of Fusion recently, a base theme that works in conjunction with the Skinr module to fulfill their vision for the future of theming and theme configuration for Drupal. They even have a theme in development that takes full advantage of the new base theme called Acquia Prosper that pretties up your site for selling stuff with Ubercart... in my opinion, their best theme on d.o to date.

However, I'm not just writing to share the good news about their release. In conjunction with their work, I have a little fun development of my own to share.

Friday evening, I buckled down to do something I'd been needing to do for a while... I updated the UberDrupal installation profile to install and configure Acquia Prosper out of the box. With that profile, you can have a functioning Drupal store in no time flat that even integrates with the sharpest contributed theme for the task! There are several modules and themes you have to have on hand before running installation, and I'll be writing those up and presenting how to use it at DrupalCamp Austin and Do It With Drupal in the next month.

Those interested in the future of Ubercart on Drupal 7 and beyond may have heard of the Ubercore Initiative. This recent development on UberDrupal was motivated in part by our goals for d7uc of improving the "packaging" aspect of what Ubercart is. We're looking to address the split personality of Ubercart as a component module vs. a ready-to-use e-commerce application. Right now, the project suffers from a lack of focus in the component module space, having incomplete Views support (requiring even a separate project to get the job done) and little integration with other major contributed modules (product image support notwithstanding). In the application space, it is limited in that there's only so much you can do through hook_install() and hook_enable(). We're hoping a bit of clarification and planning can improve it in both these areas to make Drupal the best e-commerce platform on the web.

This post will be the start of a mini-series with aggregate thoughts gathered from my notebooks, d7uc conversations, and chats on how we can improve Ubercart in the future through d7uc. I'll try to keep them short and to the point and toss in some pretty pictures and diagrams. There's been a LOT of good brainstorming so far, and I can't wait to make these plans a reality.

The future is bright.

With high spirits and much excitement for the future, Lyle and I polished up and released Ubercart 2.0 today. Thanks to all those who took notice, and an even bigger thanks to the dozens of contributors who made the release a reality.

Features of the release should come as no surprise, as most people have been using Ubercart 2.x for some time based on the project's usage statistics and personal experience. In the final days, we did iron out issues related to file downloads, role promotions, product kits, and Views integration. We also paved the way for smoother European use in conjunction with the UC2 VAT project.

For those that are interested, continue reading for my reflections on the state of the Ubercart development process and code, including a community effort to realign both of these things on Drupal 7 with the Drupal 7 Ubercore Initiative.

The teaser... Ubercart, D7, Small core influence -> Ubercore (or, d7uc).

read more

I'm super excited and happy to announce the birth of my baby girl, Éowyn Grace Szrama. She took her first breath of fresh air at 12:09 PM on September 25, 2009. The event was live blogged on Twitter, so she was immediately welcomed to Earth by Drupallers and friends from all over the world. We'll be printing her up a Google Map charting them all for her nursery.

Daddy made sure she'd feel a part of the community from day one. I pulled my baby into the world wearing one of my favorite t-shirts (visible in the background behind her little Druplicon head) so she'd know that Lullabot loves her. I even had to take it off between hospital visits to preserve it for the big day (long story).

Handing my little clay baby to momma under Lullabot's watchful eye.
Baby girl after her first feeding with a proud mom and dad.

For those interested, we've posted more pictures in a public Facebook gallery and will get some up on my Flickr account eventually. Thanks for all the encouragement and congratulations!

Well, we had our biggest release day yet with Ubercart, packaging up two new releases in one fell swoop. Lyle and I have been working pretty hard to take care of release blocking issues since we announced our Ubercart 2.0 Release Plans, and I felt inspired enough after today's Chick-fil-a lunch / code sprint to make sure we put out a new Ubercart 1.0 release as well.

The full release announcement is posted on Ubercart.org, and we've included the changelog in the release notes for both the 5.x-1.8 and 6.x-2.0-rc7 releases. On the 1.x branch, the changes include about 50 bug and typo fixes in addition to the inclusion of the core tax report module backported from the 2.x branch. The latest release candidate includes a similar number of improvements and bug fixes addressing issues related to attributes, stock, product kits, role promotions and file downloads, the price handler system, anonymous checkout, and more!

The best part of both releases is the high level of community involvement. Many thanks to the dozens of contributors to patches in both branches that have gotten us to where we are. Furthermore, thanks to some very active contributors, we're on target for full VAT support in Ubercart 2.0 with the UC VAT module. There are also maturing discount, coupon, and recurring payment systems all under active development in the contrib realm.

We're going to let this release candidate sit for two weeks time, during which we'll continue to address minor issues related to bugs, scalability, and usability. Feel free to pitch in through the project issue tracker on d.o. If all goes well, in two weeks time I'll be holding my baby girl and writing a 2.0 release announcement along with our plans for the future of Ubercart on Drupal 7 and beyond.

(For this interested, the quickest baby updates will come through Twitter. I already have plans to make sure she's very comfortable with Drupal from day one. )