Ubercart 1.0 Beta 1 Released

Well, it's been more than a year since we started working on the Ubercart project. During that time the scope of the project has widened, a third developer has come to work with us, and I spent some time getting married and taking my wife to meet some cool folks at Drupalcon Barcelona. Work on Ubercart has plugged along at a steady pace, and I've shied away from leaving behind the alphas as long as possible, convinced that we can always fix or improve just one more thing. However, the project is now at the point where we need to move on to the beta phase.

For those who don't know, Ubercart is an e-commerce suite in development for Drupal. We're doing our best to simplify installation, site setup, and order administration so you can easily perform routine store maintenance tasks. To that end, we offer out of the box image support (requires a few other Drupal modules, see the reqs.), a simple taxonomy based catalog module to showcase your products, and a total order administration system that lets you create/alter new orders quickly while logging any activity performed on an order. More recently we have integrated Workflow-ng to allow for automated order processing, taxing, and shipping quote generation all through a form based UI.

Most of the core features we originally intended (and several others like file downloads, role promotions, simple stock tracking, and more) have made it in, and the APIs while not perfect are adequate and stable. With the Drupal 6 release looming on the horizon, we've promoted the project to beta with the hopes that we can focus community attention on a few remaining issues, push out the 1.0 release, and then spend little time sleeping while we update all the code to Drupal 6. You can view this thread for more information on our emphases and outstanding issues needing to be addressed during the beta phase.

Ubercart is being used on hundreds of sites, many of which have been posted to our Live Sites directory. At least a few other Drupal companies and dedicated users have either aided in the development or begun offering targeted Drupal + Ubercart development services. Others have presented Ubercart at DUG meetings, Drupalcamps, and in training courses/books. The community support has been invaluable thus far in the maturation of the project.

To that end, I invite anyone else interested in the project to check us out, run through checkout on the Livetest, or poke around the backend on the admin demo site. Our forums have been bustling with activity for some time, and there are many knowledgeable folks out there ready to help you get started putting Ubercart to work for you. You can download the latest official release of the code through our project page or grab the development code from our Bazaar log. We have opened up our issue tracker here on d.o to bug reports (for the code or documentation) and patches. (Support and feature requests should continue to posted to our forums.)

Those anxious to dive in and help can start by reading through the beta announcement thread and joining the discussions or posting fixes to any of the items mentioned (or any glaring usability deficiencies that may have been overlooked). Any installation problems can be posted and will be addressed ASAP.

We look forward to seeing you around as we press on through beta and beyond!