My worry is that you are underestimating the development time for Ubercore. Remember what happened with the Ecommerce module when they tried to do a complete rewrite for version 4 (it is still in RC). Remember how long Views 2 took to rewrite. I also don't think it is much of a stretch to compare this with the Windows Longhorn/Vista development albeit on a much smaller scale.

An open scrum development process may guarantee that we get a solid release out at a certain date, but it doesn't guarantee that release will be useful to the majority of Ubercart users. Perhaps I am unclear on the scope of Ubercore 1.0, but at the moment I'm worried that ambitions won't meet the deadline and Drupal 7 will be without Ubercart for months on end.

"If it's not successful, well, there's no real benefit for people using Ubercart in updating their sites to Drupal 7... i.e. we'd be providing no real value and leaving people with having to migrate their sites once again when Ubercore 1.0 is released."

The value is that they get to use Drupal 7 and all it has to offer. The strength of Ubercart is that it is fully integrated with Drupal. If you disrespect that strength, alternatives like Magento start to seem more appealing.

It's worth pointing out that the 16 months it took to get Ubercart 2.0 out began with a less solid release; began (if I remember right) half a year after D6 came out; and removing those dependencies meant it wasn't a straight port. Even with that time delay and the RC status, people still stuck with Ubercart because it worked. It hasn't been perfect, but it worked.

If I understand correctly, the first major task is modularising Ubercart properly. It seems to me that there are two possible routes to achieve that. 1. Port Ubercart to D7 and then start rewriting sections of it and gradually introducing dependencies to Ubercore; all without breaking the main branch of Ubercart. That's the evolutionary and Drupal Core approach. 2. Start from scratch, and go an extended amount of time with a broken project (the Views 2 approach). If you follow the first approach, the port has to happen anyway. The second approach does make sense when you intend to do a complete rewrite, but it tends to cut out developers coming in late because it is really hard to see what the code is meant to do when nothing really works yet. That was my experience with trying to help with Ecommerce module and with helping with versions of Drupal Core prior to the current test driven development cycle. You just give up straight away because you can't see a route in.

What scared me away from the Ecommerce project and towards Ubercart was that Ubercart had energy behind it and people were starting to use it; whilst Ecommerce was caught up in a lengthy rewrite which stopped users of the module from upgrading and scared developers away.

I don't want Ubercart to make the same mistake.

When I think of what Ubercore on D7 could be - a cleaner, better-documented API, a leaner code base, stuff like Attributes being done via proper D7 fields, etc - then just UC 2 on D7 seems incredibly weak in comparison. I personally would prefer to not see the Uberteam wasting their time on this a straight D7 port and instead going ahead with giving the code base some much-needed rewriting/refactoring. Yes, this means we'll go some time without a D7 release of Ubercart, just as we did with D6. Somehow, I think we'll survive, just as we did last time.

I agree with Alpritt on this one. If the past is any indication, ubercore will either 1) take way longer than March 31st to complete or 2) the standards of whats in ubercore on March 31st will be lacking such that it won't be useful.

Ubercart 2, now that its out, should be ported to D7. Why? because its stable and it works. Yah it can be annoying at times, but it works. The main effort of #D7CX is to get people over to drupal 7 as soon as possible. Ubercart is becoming an integral part of drupal sites, and should be ready on day one.

Once you have a port, its easy to start incorporating ubercore into the old UC2 code. Take for example: Credit Card processing. This should be universal, able to work on its own (simple workflow of just making a payment w/o a cart), integrate with the Ecommerce module, or integrate into Ubercart. This can all be done while having a strong stable core that people will use.

One other thing that hasn't been mentioned here. People are not going to wait until April 1st to have ecommerce working on their D7 sites. With all the other major modules working on release date (est Jan), people will either port ubercart themselves, or create a new ecommerce package, or make drupal work better with a 3rd party cart.

The porting process also isn't that difficult. In one weekend, views was pretty much ported. If there was a sprint involving a half-dozen or so volunteers, UC2 should be working great on D7.

With the code freeze at hand, I'm really looking for the jump into the Drupal 7 arena myself.

With that said, I personally would like to see a direct port of Ubercart 2.x to Drupal 7 with out rethinking too much stuff. This is inline with the D7CX initative which I believe will help with the adoption to D7. This way everyone can port their UC contrib modules to D7 with out too much thinking. I'd even be happy with a feature freeze on D6+UC2 and D7+UC2 and focus on bug fixes.

Another thing we're forgetting is that since people are already familiar with Ubercart 2.x and if this is a straight port, we can assist with the port. I'd be interested in taking a module and doing it myself as a thanks for all your hard work.

Once we're more familiar with Drupal 7 from the port of Ubercart 2.x, we can leverage that knowledge into Ubercore + UC3.x.

After that, I'm a big fan of rethinking and creating this Ubercore you speak of. UC 3.x branch.

Firstly I support the idea to build a better ecommerce system with cleaner API's.

But I'm not sure re-writing everything is the best way to achieve this. The main reason I current support ubercart over the ecommerce project is because of the community around ubercart. And while this is probably not really a fork of ubercart it is going to divide the community into those that are interested in the underlying systems/API's and those that are just users and just need a ecommerce system for drupal.

I think its good to focus on the core (and I'm assuming by core we are talking about the database layer and API's)

I think a better strategy for getting to a D7 version and a better core:
* Separate out all the non-core modules from ubercart into their own projects (e.g. all the payment gateways & things like uc_roles don't really need to be in the core ubercart module and there are other things like tax, shipping, reports that could be removed for the moment) - there might be people willing to offer to upgrade and maintain these components.
* Then port everything thats left to D7 (running through coder & deadwood would probably get it 80% of the way).
* Then go back and look at each individually component of ubercart to refactor that component (and as this is being done upgrade functions should be written to provide as best an upgrade path as possible)
* The new tools that are being talked about for creating packaged installation profiles/distribution should allow the single download even if there are ubercart project is split up into different modules/projects.

I am 100% behind a straight port of UC to D7.

In my view, module developers should never use a Drupal version port as an opportunity to add new functionality. I'd support a movement where developers undertake to do a straight upgrade that includes absolutely no new improvements, no matter how small. We all experienced the huge delays involved in having key modules in D6 due to major revisions being tied to migration of the module to D6. There may be a small subset of cases where the absolute central functioning of a module that worked under a previous version of Drupal simply could not work in a new version without a re-write from the ground up, but I suspect these cases are actually only a small percentage. While it may seem like a good idea to pursue major feature improvements with the move to a new version of Drupal, this always creates delays.

If it's not successful, well, there's no real benefit for people using Ubercart in updating their sites to Drupal 7...
I cannot emphasize more strongly that this fundamentally misses the point from my perspective as a developer building sites that include Ubercart. Ubercart is an important part of the sites that I deploy it on, but it is far from being the whole site. I am more interested in Ubercart no longer being a barrier to deploying a D7 site, than I am in the proposed developments in Ubercore. Sure, Ubercore will make Ubercart better, but D7 makes the whole site better in many other ways. There is no good reason why a whole site should have to wait for D7 until Ubercart 3.0 is ready, when Ubercart 2.0 might be perfectly adequate for the job.

I had a sleep on whether or not I think this is a good idea and I'm not a developer so please take my opinion however you'd like.

I see merit in both points of view, but ultimately I would prefer porting UC 2.0 to D7. The reason I see it as the better idea is because UC 2.0 is a known quantity but a rewrite would mean everything is unknown, so it would be more difficult to set and meet a reasonable time-line for the latter.

The only drawback as I see it would be sheer exhaustion after the port is complete and as a result, a lack of interest in further development. Once people have Ubercart working on Drupal 7 there won't be as much interest in moving it forward.

Ryan,

Now that I have seen the vision for where to take the Ubercore, and I know that you guys have been putting your noodles together on this since at least March at DrupalConDC, I am going to switch sides.

There is some wisdom in knowing when the seemingly "easy" path will end up being more of a headache later. However, this comes with a big responsibility to perform.

Creating this site and getting people involved several months before the D7 release, and setting a sensible goal for the landing date of D7UC all show your collective vision.

Thanks for hooking me up with admin privelages, I am playing with notifications / subscriptions now.

Is my preferred option.

And released the day D7 hits the streets.

Im sure you could fit in a fair bit of D7 goodness without writing a whole new Ubercart/core (Uberc...?).

There might be a bit of extra bloatage but surely a v3 could support older APIs with a graceful path of depreciation through to v4, while at the same time providing an expanding range of sexy new D7 based APIs.

This would allow existing modules to keep working with Uberc... and also further the D7 uptake with immediate support from Uberc...

Having a written a few modules for Uberc... I would expect this sort of development path. Provide backward compatibility and a forward roadmap.

Keep up the good work peoples :)

My employer has said that he thinks porting Ubercart 2.x to D7 is a good idea and that he wants me to make sure it happens. While I will appreciate any help from the community in this, I have a tendency to be a cowboy coder hacking away in my own cave like a hermit. So, if you really do want to be involved, you have to make sure to get my attention.

I'm not planning on starting immediately, though. Deadwood is being merged into Coder for D7, and I want it to do as much of the work as possible. However, I understand that one of its dependent modules is going through a restructuring so development and testing for it is rather difficult. If I run out of other things to do (Ha! I made a funny!), I may see if there's any development work I can do to help speed it up.

Once that gets settled, I'll open up a forum post on ubercart.org for volunteer sign-ups and progress reports.