It means 'nothing'
Ubercart
Leaving is Complicated
Mar 9th
The company website (www.cibus.co.th) has gone through a number of iterations as I tried to decide the best way to do it. The current iteration runs on Drupal (version 6) and I implemented a limited install of Ubercart in the hope that someday I would fully implement it as a customer portal for ordering products directly. Unfortunately I hit a wall when I discovered that Ubercart only supports integer quantities, a problem when your products are wholesale food, so I put that on hold in the hope that the next version might change that. Now with Drupal 7 drawing closer I’ve seen clearly the direction it will be heading, the team from Ubercart have moved to something else called Drupal Commerce for political reasons, reworking the entire suite from the ground up, so I am having to re-examine the website and plan for the future.
Thus the need to redesign the site from the ground up once more without the use of Ubercart but rather using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views extensively. Though it will look mostly the same I am switching from using the Zen theme as a base to the Genesis theme. The redesign I am currently working on will enable a clean upgrade to Drupal 7 once it is released, unlike the existing implementation.
In retrospect it was wishful thinking that the company I work for would ever be ready or capable of implementing my plans. The Managing Director has a background in sales and managing restaurants/retail outlets and is a man I have a great deal of respect for, but his background causes him to focus solely on getting the product out to the detriment of everything else and in my whole time here I have never been able to get him to see the wisdom of organising the company operations in a more manageable fashion. If I’m ever asked in a job interview to recount a situation where I could have done better this will be it. I have no hard feelings towards him at all though because were it not for him the company would surely have failed by now, I have only regrets of what I had hoped to achieve.
Another Nail in The Ubercart Coffin
Jul 17th
After setting up a website for my mother, enabling her to accept orders for her small business I began to quite like Ubercart for its simplicity. One of the big things I like is the attributes system, where a product can have user-definable variations that can affect the price. There are limitations of course, but being free is a big bonus.
The only element of Ubercart that isn’t free is the time it will take to discover its limitations. With all its simplicity comes quite a lot of rigid inflexibility and today I have hit a point that goes to the very core of Ubercart: it lacks support for anything but discreet units for products (no decimals), lacks support for ordering by a specific unit of measure (UOM) and thus doesn’t have any kind of UOM conversion available.
I was in the planning stages of transitioning our company website to using Ubercart but now that I’ve discovered this particular weak point, using Ubercart in this case will be impossible. What is it about software that individual packages will include a single great feature but lack everything else I need? If only it were possible to take all those great features and make one super application… Why do developers tortue me so?
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