After countless hours of development, experimentation, API referencing, and good ol' fashioned beating our heads against our desks, the team at Ubercart.org has finally put up an initial release of the Übercart module package. This is being considered an alpha release, with the official 1.0 release being many development hours away as we build on and flesh out some of the core systems. However, the module package as it stands is able to run e-commerce sites and is already being used in live sites. Everyone is welcome to showcase their Übercart site in our forums!

In short, Übercart is a module package designed to let administrators run an e-commerce store on their Drupal sites. For more information, you can view the project page. This package has been developed to address a different set of needs and accommodate some different design goals than the current e-commerce module package. We hope to build a comparison and contrast page on our site that store owners can use to compare feature sets, and we look forward to getting some input from the e-commerce experts and developers experienced with other open source e-commerce solutions!

While still in its infancy, Übercart is well on its way toward hosting our e-commerce sites, which we long to free from the bonds of osCommerce. Expect more module development, catalog enhancements, and usability improvements as the project matures. We will specifically address importing product catalogs from osCommerce to Übercart in the near future, and our ultimate goal is to port our osCommerce enhancements providing inventory, QuickBooks, and eBay integration. We would love to hear your feedback and incorporate your ideas into the project to give Übercart broad appeal even beyond the borders of the Drupal community.

Feel free to download the project, play around with the administrative sections with an eye toward usability, and offer up your bug reports and ideas in the forums. We have no false assumptions that everything here is pretty and ready to wow you, but we hope you can at least get an idea of where we're headed and offer up some killer ideas for improvement.

Project page: http://drupal.org/project/ubercart

Drupal version: Drupal 5.x