The first post-DrupalCon meetup in Denver had a great turnout. Many new people, hungry for more Drupal. And pizza. Our pizza vendor kindly threw in an extra pizza to thank us for ordering so much. And the local Drupalistas rose to the challenge and ate it all. We ate it up.
Rick Manelius kindly satisfied our hunger for more Drupal with an overview of the Ubercart and Commerce modules in Drupal 7. Money, Rick pointed out, keeps clients in business, allowing them to keep us working with Drupal. And Ubercart and Commerce are the main tools for clients to accept money directly in Drupal, so they're worth learning about.
But before getting into when and why we should use Ubercart or Commerce, Rick went over some reasons to avoid taking payments in Drupal:
- Selling very few physical products (less than 10)
- PCI compliance is too costly (a whole presentation by itself)
- No need for contextual layouts
Assuming you have many physical products or virtual products to sell, can handle PCI compliance, and would make use of contextual layouts, you probably want to take payments in Drupal. If that's the case, your main options with Drupal 7 are Commerce and Ubercart. Rick described both Ubercart and Commerce as capable e-commerce systems, but pointed out some contrasts to make the choice clearer.
Ubercart is generally an out-of-the-box solution. This means many assumptions are made about your use case, which has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it's ready to go as soon as you enable it. Drupalistas don't have to spend a lot of time configuring it, and clients don't have to pay for that time, so it's especially good for cost-conscious clients.
Commerce, on the other hand, is more a DIY framework. There are far fewer assumptions about what you're doing with Commerce -- which means it's incredibly flexible -- but it also takes more work to configure. This is great for larger clients who have more unique use cases.
Rick demonstrated these differences with a specific example of creating coupons in the two systems. In Ubercart, you turn on the coupon functionality and start creating coupons. In Commerce, you first define your coupon type, which fields you want on the coupons, and also define rules for how coupons should be redeemed. If you want to do something with coupons that Ubercart doesn't do right away, the flexibility of Commerce can be great. If, on the other hand, you just want coupons quick and easy and don't have a very unique use case, Ubercart is simpler.
One of the first questions for Rick was about Commerce Kickstart, a Drupal distribution with Commerce pre-configured. Rick talked about how Kickstart moves Commerce closer to the out-of-the-box experience of Ubercart, and how Commerce Kickstart 2.0 will move even more in that direction. I asked if Ubercart is similarly becoming more flexible, more friendly for developers. Rick said no. He expects Commerce to eventually be the best choice for all Drupal e-commerce projects. As Commerce just last week passed Ubercart in usage numbers for Drupal 7, this seems like a good prediction.
Until then, Ubercart and Commerce are both good solutions and Rick gave us a great overview on his approach to picking one or the other (or neither) for any given project.
After several questions, and a plug for Maida launching the new Pueblo Library Drupal site, several of us headed over to Interstate Kitchen and Bar for more drinks, dessert, and more conversation. I had chocolate pie. I ate it up.