UberDrupal Integrates with Acquia Prosper
Top Notch Themes released the first beta of Fusion recently, a base theme that works in conjunction with the Skinr module to fulfill their vision for the future of theming and theme configuration for Drupal. They even have a theme in development that takes full advantage of the new base theme called Acquia Prosper that pretties up your site for selling stuff with Ubercart... in my opinion, their best theme on d.o to date.
However, I'm not just writing to share the good news about their release. In conjunction with their work, I have a little fun development of my own to share. 
Friday evening, I buckled down to do something I'd been needing to do for a while... I updated the UberDrupal installation profile to install and configure Acquia Prosper out of the box. With that profile, you can have a functioning Drupal store in no time flat that even integrates with the sharpest contributed theme for the task! There are several modules and themes you have to have on hand before running installation, and I'll be writing those up and presenting how to use it at DrupalCamp Austin and Do It With Drupal in the next month.
Those interested in the future of Ubercart on Drupal 7 and beyond may have heard of the Ubercore Initiative. This recent development on UberDrupal was motivated in part by our goals for d7uc of improving the "packaging" aspect of what Ubercart is. We're looking to address the split personality of Ubercart as a component module vs. a ready-to-use e-commerce application. Right now, the project suffers from a lack of focus in the component module space, having incomplete Views support (requiring even a separate project to get the job done) and little integration with other major contributed modules (product image support notwithstanding). In the application space, it is limited in that there's only so much you can do through hook_install() and hook_enable(). We're hoping a bit of clarification and planning can improve it in both these areas to make Drupal the best e-commerce platform on the web. 
This post will be the start of a mini-series with aggregate thoughts gathered from my notebooks, d7uc conversations, and chats on how we can improve Ubercart in the future through d7uc. I'll try to keep them short and to the point and toss in some pretty pictures and diagrams. There's been a LOT of good brainstorming so far, and I can't wait to make these plans a reality.
The future is bright. 
