Selling Customizable Products with Ubercart

We were shortsighted. I wish we'd been thinking more along this line from the beginning. Who knows what sort of e-commerce situations Ubercart would be able to handle now if we had geared it toward customizable products from the get go? Drupal really is the perfect CMS to handle this sort of e-commerce need... These thoughts are provoked by a recent German store, Leinwandfoto Discount, that blew me away when I saw its live site listing this morning. Using Drupal and Ubercart, the development team created a site where users can upload photos that can be turned into canvas prints for their living room walls for a small fee. Geez, I'd love to have the Uberkid on my wall. Check out their site and give these guys some feedback if you have a minute. Not only did they build a great site, but they also gave the code back to the community in the form of a couple new and reworked contributions. Way to go! They're not alone in the innovation, though. A recently launched site by popular Milenio, Fotos Chic, also sells prints of photos on Ubercart. Earlier this year, Lullabot sponsored development of the first UC Node Checkout module that's getting plenty of use to help folks build customized product forms. You can demo this one first hand by signing up to learn more about Ubercart at Do It With Drupal. Other sites are building full user marketplaces and affiliate programs using contributed modules that I only wish I had the time to play with and hack on. C'est la vie. I can at least keep plugging away on the core. Here's to development in community.