Roughly two years ago, I prepared a diagram of the dependencies in the then-current version of Drupal e-Commerce (eC) for Drupal 4.6.
Now, with other eC projects looming ahead, a
possible session about eC at Szeged,
and eC 4 being in alpha, I figured it was time to update the model. Boy, has it changed ! Click the thumbnail for the full-size view.
If you are [considering] working on an e-Commerce site, and are coming to the Szeged Drupalcon, you may be interested in several sessions around the theme. In order for your session(s) of choice to stand a chance of being actually part of the conference program, you should vote for the sessions you would like to attend.
Subjet to approval by the conference board, I will be animating/presenting a session about the internals of the e-Commerce suite: see http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions/developing-e-commerce for more details. If this is of interest to you, vote on the session to make sure it will indeed be included in the conference program.
I was working on an existing site today, and after installing the e-commerce 3.4 suite (EC), noticed something was very weird: product type modules were enabled, all basic EC modules were there too, and yet, when I created products by hand, the "Anonymous purchase" fieldset appeared, but nothing else from EC.
Worse, when saving the new products, they were properly created in the {node} table, but never appeared in the {ec_product} table, which caused them never to appear as products in the admin products list of the product view available to users. What could be going on ?
With OSInet focusing more heavily now on Drupal services, the company is now offering internships for students interested in working on Drupal.
First things first, I've offered to mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and would be specifically interested if a student picked up the live Drupal backup project if it came to be approved.
This table shows which operations are actually documented, used, and implemented, by the e-commerce ProductAPI, hook_productapi().
As many other developers of e-commerce sites using Drupal, I've had to solve the problem of integrating the "front-office" store maintained in the ecommerce module with the back-office data like the actual invoicing matching legal requirements, tax documents, product ordering from suppliers, and so on, and I've had to choose a toolkit for this.
Until recently I had been using Delphi with XML-RPC to upload content and remotely monitor my sites, but I was looking for a cross-platform solution, and one that would preferably have sources available. Using Kylix for other projects and it *does* work, even with SOAP and remote data stores, but the level of support and lack of upgrades from Borland regarding it left me rather skeptical about using it for new projects. And this was not even taking into account the fact the XML-RPC for Delphi and Kylix is a poorly supported Open Source project. So what ?
UPDATED for eC4 in new post
The Drupal ecommerce module suite is a rapidly evolving and quite massive part of Drupal, and newcoming developers may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of modules included in the suite. This UML dependency diagram chart should help understand how the modules fit together.
For anyone trying to understand the inner working of the
Drupal e-Commerce 4.6.* module, a pair of UML data model diagrams
should be really helpful.