e-Commerce future

With the release of e-Commerce 6.x-4.0,1,2 we have finally hit a huge milestone. It has taken a while but I am extremely happy with where e-Commerce is after all this time. It was a huge rebuild, and there is still many things that I want to get done.

Over the next couple of months the work on e-Commerce is going to be as follows.

• Port 4.x to Drupal 7.x
• Finish porting the checkout to use ctools and also modify so that it can be used not only for checkout but also to create transactions/invoicing for customers.
• Allow new checkout to use receipts in credit for payment, and also build a screen to allow payments to be made on existing transactions and payments to be made for use against future transactions.
• ...
• Start working on e-Commerce 5.x

e-Commerce 5.x

I have been thinking about 5.x and how we can build on this great new base. The main focus of 5.x will be the products and how they are implemented within the system. I have discussed this with a number of people as I have been collecting my thoughts and I will let more of this out once I start working on this I will let more of my thoughts out.

But the main thing that I will be doing is cleaning up the ec_product table to be a much better representation of your products in the warehouse. If you are not using subproducts then there is not going to be too many changes on this front end but will make other things easier.

• Remove Product API in favor of just using product features should remove a lot of code and make things a little faster
• Turn products into their own entities which will make it much easier to implement things like kit and apparel (subproducts) products. This is going to be the major development in 5.x
• Turn receipts, customers into entities so they can be extended with the field api.
• Include Paper Payments directly in receipting. With entities and the field api we will be able to extend payment types to allow the collection of different information.
• Change PayPal to use the new PayPalX API which will give use a lot more functionality and things like Mall stores can be implemented.

This is not as big a changes as 4.x but there is still a lot of work here. Now with the new structure upgrading will be a lot easier and new tools such as git (which will be f****n amazing) implementing these changes will be much easier and I will not have redo so much work that I lost.

Look back on e-Commerce 4.x

4.x was a huge development, and sometimes I think the amount of work involved I think was too much and took way too long. But the good thing is that the things that I considered completely broken in 3.x and early have now been fixed, and now we have a great platform for moving forward to be able to do some great things.

Drupal 7.0 has been released and I am currently working on getting out a version of e-Commerce for 7.x. The main things that is going to hold up a final release will be the dependencies the e-Commerce as of Views, VBO, CTools and rules which need to have final versions before we can say e-Commerce has a stable release, but I do hope to have betas and rc's out before then. The good things is that the projects we depend on all have versions for 7.x so there is nothing stopping us from getting on with the upgrade.

Even though there were pledges to have versions for Drupal 7.x when it was released, only rules pledged this out of the 4 projects and really it has only been the last couple of months that we have been able to seriously look at porting to 7.x so I feel that we are not that far behind. But since e-Commerce for Drupal 7.x will be a direct port of 4.x for Drupal 6.x so the upgrade should not take as much work, and once that is done git will be available and doing the other things will be easy.

Lastly

I am extremely happy with where e-Commerce is right now, and I am really looking forward to continue building e-Commerce and making it even better.