With the recent unveiling of the beta release, I'm extremely excited to be at DrupalCon Chicago to promote the project and help new users figure out how to put the modules to work for them. I'll also be on the lookout for more developers interested in helping extend the functionality of Drupal Commerce through contributed modules.
Read more to find out how to learn more Drupal Commerce at the conference.
You can find out more about the project and how to get involved in any of these ways...
Getting "there" from "here". If only it were as simple as finding directions on a Google Map. : )
The goal? Have a solid 1.0 release by Drupal Commerce with a simple installation profile ready for new users to start selling on Drupal 7.
Where are we now? Still firmly in alpha territory, with a beta looming. In the last few days, the big ticket item - dynamic pricing and price pre-calculation - has landed, preparing the way for taxes and tax display. The only major feature left then will be physical product description fields, but we're going to hold off on rushing any shipping price calculation for 1.0. Work will develop around this in contrib and be targeted for a 2.0 inclusion if ready.
The first Drupal Commerce alpha release received little fanfare here somehow. In the press of DrupalCon Copenhagen, I neglected to post the news here of all places! Well, I'm fixing that right now with this little announcement for our second alpha release that just went live minutes ago. You can download it from our project page on drupal.org.
Most everything worth saying about the release is in the release notes, so I encourage you to read those. The short version is we now have a fully functioning Payment module, making alpha 2 a great time for payment integrators to start roughing out their Commerce integration. There's also a great base test class for Commerce tests with documentation to go with it, so folks looking to dig into the modules and APIs are encouraged to do it while writing some much needed tests.
The Specification handbook here has also received quite a bit of love to go along with the release, so I encourage you to poke around and provide feedback on its structure and on the content that's actually there. For now you'll need to look in the Info hooks and Utilizing the core APIs sections as the others are just scaffolding.
Our code sprint at the end of June resulted in an abundance of tickets for outstanding development on existing systems and projected improvements to checkout to accommodate the payment system. Several of these include UI mock-ups provided by Bojhan for us to work towards. We also planned out the payment implementation as much as possible, considering different payment workflows (CC on site, hosted payment, hosted checkout, etc.) and payment information security. There were also certain items that we tabled for future discussion, like the implementation of shipping and taxes.
Tangibly, this discussion and development boils down to two things. First, there's a fine queue of issues tagged dcsprint3 in the d.o tracker to complete. Second, we have the following roadmap for development leading up to DrupalCon Copenhagen:
DrupalCon Copenhagen is only a month and a half away, meaning we have our work cut out for us to prepare a Drupal Commerce release for presentation at the conference. After last week's code sprint, summarized here, we have a clear path forward and will be posting a roadmap for the next few weeks in the next day or two.
After DrupalCamp Colorado, we'll be flying back to the Commerce Guys office in Jackson, MI for a Drupal Commerce sprint. We'll be traveling Monday June 28, so the sprint will be Tuesday through Friday, June 29 - July 2. DamZ and bojhan will be joining us from Europe, and it looks like we'll have mfer for a day.
If you're interested in joining us, let us know so we can work out travel arrangements from the airport in Detroit and lodging in Jackson. I'm looking forward to a productive week after an extended weekend of hacking and brainstorming in Denver.
Prior to the sprint we'll post a list of high priority issues for our time together. This is bound to include further work on the Rules based price handler and completion of the critical Addressfield module.
Those wishing to pitch in virtually can also keep the low-hanging fruit issue queue handy. We've had some good participation in there this past week and I'm eager to see it pick up.
I'll be heading to DrupalCamp Colorado with some of the other Commerce Guys to present the current status of Drupal Commerce, promote the project, and collaborate with other Drupallers there. We went last year in a combined DrupalCamp / Ubercamp, and the e-commerce focus of the camp was very well received. Hopefully we can repeat the success and get some other contributors to show up... or find new contributors while we're there!
If you're interested, the camp is in Denver, CO on June 26-27th. The price of the event is dirt cheap, and we'll be hanging out around town the day before. I'd love to do a Commerce sprint while we're there, and I'd encourage anyone interested in presenting Drupal Commerce or general e-commerce sessions to do so!
Comment here if you're thinking of going so we can coordinate our time in town.
UPDATE: Since DrupalCon San Francisco, we've built a more up to date demo available at http://bit.ly/dc-demo-cg.
I presented the current work of Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon San Francisco. The session had a few slides of minor consequence but was mostly a technical demonstration / walkthrough of what has been implemented and how it was done.
I've updated the front page here with some of the text from the demo site, but it also includes the following bullet points about what's implemented so far:
Commerce entities: products, orders, and line items
Commerce fields: product reference, line item reference, price, postal address
Views integration: full entity coverage, default administrative UI, cart line item Views
Product functionality: product types with custom "Attribute" fields, product creation and management
Line item functionality: module defined line item types, #ajax enabled line item manager as a field widget
Order functionality: order creation and management, module defined order states and statuses
Cart functionality: add to cart form (via product reference field formatters), shopping cart orders, shopping cart block, drag-and-drop multi-page checkout form builder
Check it out and lemme know what you think!
Currently, I'm creating an installation profile based on that site and updating the code to run on Drupal 7.x-alpha3. Then before the CMS Expo next week I'll have the front end of checkout working with Damien's Postal Address module integrated.
The content of this post should be boiled down into an easy to read documentation page, probably at development/roadmap, and it might even do to have a link in the sidebar directly to it. We spent quite a bit of time at the Paris Sprint discussing the various systems we needed to develop in order to start checking out orders. This involved a lot of great discussion about the future of orders, the shopping cart, checkout, and price handling.
During our last IRC meeting, we discussed a sprint in Paris at the end of this month. We set the dates for February 22-26 and will be working out of af83's office. We got a little bit of planning in but will need another meeting or two between now and then to be best prepared for our time together.
