By Wombats

Ken and Addison have scheduled Greg Bear and myself for a 90 minute session titled Selling with Drupal on Wednesday morning of the conference. Greg and I will join forces to chat about the benefits of using a Drupal based e-commerce solution (as opposed to a dedicated application or a weak integration) and the nuts and bolts of preparing to sell online. Then we'll split up and each have a chance to talk about e-commerce solutions in Drupal. As you might guess, I'll spend my time presenting Ubercart, demoing its simple installation/setup and core features using the Livetest. I'm also excited about the opportunity to showcase some awesome sites that are taking advantage of various core features. We'll close off the session with some group Q&A time and stick around to chat for a while afterwards.

I've posted a brief outline of the Ubercart Overview below. Feel free to comment on either the outline or this event in Boston's history that I was unaware of until today.

Ubercart Overview:

• Short description of what Ubercart is and what our guiding principles for development are.
• Brief look at the history and future of the Ubercart project.
• Overview of a basic installation. (Refer to this thread for more info.)
• Features overview using the Livetest to demo various customer and admin features. The bulk of my time will be spent here to disseminate as much information about the project's capabilities as possible.
• Site showcase of a few Ubercart sites I like. I wish I had time for more, but I'll be zipping through these as it is! For those interested, unless things change I'll be showing:
  • Riff Trax for its use of cart links and file downloads.
  • Avenged Sevenfold as an example of Warner Bros. Records' use of the role assignments feature for various artist fan club memberships.
  • Sassy Sweet Treats and the recent H.JLYNN Collection for their look and use of various core and contributed modules to sell their goods... and they do look good!
• Overview of the various Drupal core and contributed systems that Ubercart integrates (users, taxonomy, themes, forms, Workflow-ng, CCK, Views, Userpoints)
• An introduction to the community site and resources.

It'll be a flurry of an overview, and I can't wait to do it! I've attached a PDF copy of my slides to this post. They're subject to peer and community review and may be a little different come conference time. I'll post up here if there are any major changes.

I'll be looking to schedule a BoF session for Ubercart developers sometime during the conference, but I suppose that mostly depends on demand for such a session. Personally, I'd love to meet and hash out a plan for updating Ubercart for Drupal 6 and beyond. Any internationalization gurus are encouraged to attend to help us make sure the core aids and abets instead of hinders international and multilingual sites from using Ubercart.

Those interested in an UberDinner meet-up or some site seeing should checkout this thread on Ubercart.org. We're trying to gauge interest before setting definite plans.

See you all in Boston!