Acquia Webinar Lists Top Drupal eCommerce Modules

This morning, Acquia presented a Webinar entitled: “Using Open Source Drupal to Rapidly Deploy New Features for e-Commerce.”  This was a strong presentation chock-full of some very helpful take-aways. One of my favorites was a list of recommended modules for ecommerce *although* a goodly number are designed to work with UberCart and not (it seems) Drupal Commerce — which, btw, got a solid recommendation from the panelists. And yet . . . UberCart is quickly moving toward UC3 for D7: See the UC road map at http://drupal.org/node/696816. As of April 6, 2011, the UC developers were looking for a few good reviewers to break some code. It is a rare day in Open Source when the last chapter is written.

You can find that list right here:

Ubercart – the venerable Drupal eCommerce module. Note that conversation regarding Ubercart’s viability in Drupal 7 was plentiful. Short answer: Drupal Commerce is the one to use if you’re working in D7. DC is in beta as of now. Hang on awhile longer. But I for one still want to test the UC3 roll out.

Speaking of: Drupal Commerce. Yep, recommended by Acquia during the Q&A if you’re going to run D7. All of this a topic unto itself.

Voucher – Othewise known as Ubercart Discount Coupons. Coupons galore and all kinds of ways to implement them. Is there a D7 (another way of saying a UC3) release? Not on the horizon, I think.

Apache Solr – Written in Java, Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Drupal’s Solr search can be used as a replacement for core content search and boasts both extra features and better performance. D7 release still in dev.

Recommendations – Another UberCart module. From the module page: “The ‘Recommended for you’ block provide personalized products recommendations based on a user’s purchasing history.” D6. Looks like its slowly enroute to D7, presumably meant to work with UC3. Just guessing.

Upsell – From the module page: “UC Upsell is an advertising / upselling module for Übercart that allows merchants to associate multiple products together. These “related products” can be displayed as a themeable block either at the cart page, on other product detail pages, or both. Since it’s a block, it can be displayed whenever the themed block is called.” No information re a D7 port to UC3.

EUVAT Support – Well, I don’t know that this one would be on my list, necessarily. Anyway, from the module page: “This module provides support for European VAT pricing and regulations in Ubercart 2, allowing your store to show product prices inclusive of VAT. You do not need this module if you only want to charge VAT at checkout.” Longwave commented on the D7 Port page for this module: “I will wait to see what UC3.0 supports before working on a D7 release of uc_vat.”

Rating and Review – Another oldie but goodie. D7 release in development. I’ve never used it (maybe I wanted to avoid the horror of only receiving a single star for something or the other) but it’s always worked well and even sorta a fun thing to offer site visitors and users.

You can find out more about Acquia’s Webinars at www.acquia.com/resources/webinars. And check out Acquia’s upcoming Drupal in a Day events at www.acquia.com/community/resources/events.