Commerce Guys recently hosted a workshop to prepare the roadmap for Drupal Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8. During the week, we spent a bit of time reviewing and committing the final patches needed to release Drupal Commerce 1.4. The new version is a maintenance release incorporating 87 patches from 40 different contributors around the world - I love it! These patches add a variety of new features to the core of Drupal Commerce and make it more performant and suited to international usage.

I've summarized the key changes in this post. The full list of changes and update instructions can be found in the release notes on drupal.org.

New features

The Add to Cart form and checkout form have both seen improvements. Most notable on the checkout form is the new setting to allow copying of fields from one customer profile to another. This feature was a part of the Commerce Shipping module but was moved to core and designed to work server side across multiple checkout pages and even between customer profile types that may have different fields. The Account information checkout pane was also updated to support e-mail address verification through double entry.

We included a variety of Views integration improvements, including adding a missing handler, updating area handlers for Views 3.5, supporting redirect destinations on our entity operation links, and adding a node filter to only show product display nodes.

Finally, we added a few features to make it simpler for site builders to build product pricing rules. Foremost among these is a new Price comparison condition that supports multi-currency price comparisons and accepts input in major currency unit decimal values instead of minor unit integer values (i.e. compare in Dollars or Euros instead of Cents). We also added a read only computed property allowing you to use the generic Data comparison condition against these major unit decimal values.

We launched the new DrupalCommerce.org in the wee hours of the morning after a marathon migration sprint. As I mentioned before, the old site was created on Drupal 6 in late 2009 and was minimally maintained as a community forum. We always wanted to build a much more intentional user self-help community, but we were limited by the technology we were running.

The new site was built from scratch on Drupal 7 to give us a much more flexible foundation. Aaron Dudenhofer implemented the design you see as an Omega subtheme, and I built many of the features while Kris Vanderwater figured out how to use the Migrate module to move old content into the new systems.

There's still more content to flesh out and a little site building to be done, but let's take a quick look at the most prominent new features:

DrupalCon Denver will be the first major DrupalCon to offer a Commerce track in addition to a full day of Drupal Commerce training before the conference. While it's a modest start at 5 sessions spread throughout the entire 3 day session schedule, it's an important step toward raising the profile of e-commerce on Drupal.

The Commerce sessions accepted include:

• Drupal Commerce by Ryan Szrama - the big picture overview and functional demonstration of Drupal Commerce.
• Drupal Commerce Contrib Overview by Pedro Cambra - a trip through all the major contributed Drupal Commerce modules and their current state of development.
• PCI: A Four Letter Word of E-commerce by Matt Kleve - an explanation of the payment card industry's security standards and requirements for e-commerce sites.
• Recurring Billing is hard, is hard, is hard... by Joe Shindelar - a discussion of the strategies and pitfalls for recurring billing on an e-commerce site.
• Accepting Payments Online: A Building Block Approach by Allie Micka - a discussion of the vocabulary and processes involved in accepting payments online.

If you haven't attended a DrupalCon in the past, it's the premier Drupal event in the U.S. drawing upwards of 4,000 attendees. While there are only a handful of sessions dealing directly with Drupal Commerce or e-commerce topics, the variety of sessions presented at the conference will more than likely apply to your process of building a complete Drupal based website. Sessions pertaining to Views, Rules, Git, and other contributed modules and contribution processes are sure to help you.

We look forward to seeing you there!

DrupalCon Chicago was quite a rush. It was the first Drupal event since we've hit a stable release of the Commerce modules, and the feedback from all directions was extremely positive. The video for my session, Drupal Commerce: Setting up shop on Drupal 7, was posted to archive.org, but the service there isn't the most reliable or feature-rich. As such, I've cross-posted the video to vimeo, so watch away!

Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon Chicago from Ryan Szrama on Vimeo.