Central Florida February Meetup

Hey Mike, I think building a simple site is a good way to learn the ropes. It would be best to develop a specific use case ahead of time, the standard one being some sort of a t-shirt store. If you're feeling gutsy, you could broaden it a smidge to be a band website that sells band t-shirts, downloadable music, and fan club memberships in the form of role promotions. I'd love to make that into a book, so I'm not sure it would fit a 2 hr. meet-up. ; )

So, how about a simple store selling physical goods? You can walk through installation, initial configuration, and setting up simple taxes and flat rate shipping. For an example, you can check out the Ubercart chapter in Using Drupal by Lullabot. They sent me a copy, and I was blown away by how good the UC chapter is. You can also find more tips on store configuration in the Ubercart guide produced by Top Notch Themes. They develop themes customized specifically for Ubercart use, a shrewd business move when you look at the sales tally on a theme like Sharp Sales. They also license and distribute copies of the Ubercart chapter from Using Drupal w/ every Ubercart theme they sell!

For event based stores, I highly recommend my UC Node Checkout. The documentation is lacking at the moment, but the gist of it is it allows you to send the customer to fill out a node form when they add a specific product to the cart. The newly created node is associated with that product in their cart, so when they check out, you can do something with the nodes "in their cart." I developed this module initially for use on D5 for Do It With Drupal, but I since have been able to expand it to support attributes on the node forms and include multiple event product support per node type through Views. Basically... it rocks! As soon as I can get this documented w/ some screencasts, I'm sure it'll become one of the most popular Ubercart contrib modules.

Another one that folks may not know about is one I wrote called UC Node Access, which lets you sell access to view nodes on the site. There's also a product feature module I wrote called UC Restrict Qty that, when added to a product, restricts the customer to purchasing just one of that product at a time (useful for events, node access, file downloads, etc.). It actually turns the Qty. textfield on the cart form to a plaintext 1. : )

There are plenty of others deserving more attention, but these should do ya for now.

I replied w/ some more info on QuickBooks integration down below.

Hope that helps!