Ubercart Alternative

For our last meet-up that we were organizing I put an item on there to discuss a shopping cart alternative for Ubercart. Since then they released their first stable version of the software. It's called Magento, and it is an open source project similar to Drupal (obviously not as big as Drupal yet, though). This came up on my news feed today:

As part of Google Summer of Code ‘08, a Magento / Drupal integration project is getting off the ground. A detailed proposal has been posted on the Groups.Drupal site, and the abstract is included below:

Magento has just released production ready version 1.0 and has comprehensive support ecosystem for its users. Current existing ecommerce modules for Drupal either do not have production ready release or do not support Drupal 6. Hence, integration between Drupal and Magento will be the powerful combination and will drive embracing of Drupal 6 even more.

This project aims to tightly integrate Magento into Drupal by coming up with a Magento module and a few essential native Magento blocks. The integration is elaborate up to the level of rendering Magento as a Drupal page.

There has been a lot of interest by the Magento and Drupal communities for such an integration to take place. This is certainly going to be picking up a lot of steam in the weeks ahead.

I think that this is a great idea for the Drupal community. Personally, I like Ubercart, but feel as though it is very module heavy. The one site that I installed it on doesn't run nearly as fast as it should be. If the developers can build some awesome modules/blocks to integrate with it then that solution could blow eCommerce and Ubercart out of the water. Since it runs on PHP and MySQL it could be installed on the same server and run independently. I think this could turn into something really incredible. We'll see what this summer holds in store!