Liveblogging Drupal Commerce Camp Lucerne 2011 / Friday

All right, let's get this started. It's 9am in Lucerne, after some rain in the morning, things have cleared up. Everything's a bit rough on the edges in terms of signage, organization etc., still, it's just the first Commerce camp. Now for Byhet and McGuire as the keynote speakers.

Oh, first some introductory notes: fees are being refunded thanks to sponsors and food is free too, plus Apéro, nice.

Keynote

McGuire says Drupal 7 is being adopted fantastically fast but we do need to leave the Drupal echo chamber to reach further. Also, Commerce 1.0 happened and the company-names-slide is packed. What's the most common thing people mention? Flexibility. It's a huge box of legos (love the metaphor) but that's hard to sell. Products/Distributions go beyond the lego box and make the process of selling Drupal easier.

Byhet shows us where online commerce came, hello "modem commerce" in the 80s, hello 90s with Amazon and the first standardized platform ATG. 00s: Oh look, there's Magento. Now for the present: diverse customers, places to shop (on- and offline), devices and information sources. There is no longer a direct mass-media marketing push but a diverse web of interactions.

Commerce getting traction due to multichannel, customer experience and more, says Byhet. Interesting factoid: 70% of the web is running without a CMS. What?! Hard to believe, I should research that. Drupal as the new Linux, interesting analogy.

Important highlight: Commerce Guys poured large amounts of R&D for upstream patches into Drupal 7 and creating Drupal Commerce. Some open source projects can run on part-time volunteers but (see Linux) the commercial support does make a difference in terms of development speed, functionality and release cycles.

eCommerce landscapes and Drupal

[Slides] Banerjee from Anolim takes a survey of the audience, developers seem to be the most common. Shows the different general approaches: CMS-based (Drupal, Wordpress), stand-alone (Magento), proprietary ERP (SAP), stand-alone proprietary (Hybris) and eCommerce SaaS (Amazon, eBay). Commerce in Drupal is given by the modules Ecommerce, Ubercart, Drupal Commerce and Bespoke.

The vast majority of Drupal 6 shops is Ubercart. Drupal Commerce completely build on D7 though Ubercart will also be available for D7. Though many Ubercart modules are not yet available for Drupal Commerce and subscriptions/services aren't very advanced yet.

Competitors: Magento in contrast to the CMS approach does its core competencies well, as long as you don't want to customize any of it and has a steep learning curve. Wordpress as the main Drupal competitor looks really nice but is not as flexible, also eight different modules and some have paid "gold versions".

Case studies

Kampajobs: Soon to relaunch automated job posting platform tiered to NGO/NPO, which is switching from free to paid services via Drupal Commerce. The discussion highlighted how complex invoicing procedures can become and that supporting those isn't trivial. (Kampaweb)

Sosense.org: Donation platform via credit card and invoice for social investors. Integrates a review workflow for due diligence and bilingual availability of all content. Integrates Drupal Commerce, og, heartbeat. Currently just CHF supported but more currencies are planned, another issue which highlights "hidden" complexity in commerce processes. (Amazee)

Naturstrombörse: Selling local renewable energy. Heavily relying on Google Maps and geocoding. Ubercart was evaluated but not used due to not being as easy customizable for this specific use-case. Expanded to multi-platform solution for integrating but also customizing for different cantonal providers. Looking towards relaunching via Drupal Commerce and Openlayers. (Floid)

Lunch break.

Case studies II

SaaS:: [Slides] Recurring payments are not easy to implement, due to the PCI requirements etc. using a payment service provider in some form or another is needed. However, now when you don't handle that payment information, what happens when this changes? Not a trivial problem at all. Similar to that is: who triggers the recurring transaction? Also, Chargebacks.

Business Process Management: How can Drupal transform a manual administrative paper-base workflow efficiently? A case in Drupal 6 with CCK & Views. (Plüss)

guzuu.com: A Swiss etsyesque plattform. Uses Drupal core and a few contrib elements, thus quite different from most shops here and oriented along using Drupal as a framework. This echoes what Remo has been advocating in terms of Drupal being an ideal CMS framework onto which other frameworks or custom solutions can be build on top of. Interestingly, from a good dozen contrib modules CCK is used but Views is not due to not being needed and performance aspects. (Netnode)

Open Government and Open Data

The final talk for today is a break from the previous talks and focuses on Open Government and Open Data in a Drupal context, e.g. fixmystreet. Now we are being bribed with t-shirts.I find this topic interesting but the speaker does not seem able to tie this into the theme of the conference at all.

And it's a wrap.