Just FYI, your points in 8 are pretty much not going to happen, with the exception of "Nice" URLs. I think the entirety of Drupal uses sessions for the user system, and Ubercart uses it for the orders system. Cookies are almost avoidable in every day life as well, and given that, PHP keeps track of cookies in .. you guessed it. Sessions. Is there a reason why you have those restrictions?

The rest of it looks like it's pretty much Ubercart right out of the box, with the exception of Coupons and Discounts - those modules might still need some work.

I'd like to integrate Google Checkout, but we're still waiting on them for confirmation of our status as an approved e-commerce provider. Once that comes in, I'll be a rather busy bee rolling that out.

I was under the impression that storing data in the session was more secure than cookies, and certainly more so than query strings. Query strings, even in POST can be intercepted if you're not careful, and they're a pain in the butt to code around anyway. I believe that session data is stored on the server, and the client gets a cookie with some hashed string that matches them up to the right session.

The current (in development) Google Checkout is working fine for us with level 1 support. It will be terrific when Lyle gets the level 2 integration working. See it here: http://www.hugamonkey.com/cart

In addition, I don't think that upselling is possible with Ubercart at this point. At least judging by my question here, which never got a response.

Ryan has confirmed my distrust of DE as a viable solution. On my last assignment, I actually uninstalled all the modules and replaced with Ubercart since it was a complete mess. Ubercart has really impressed me with how well it integrates in with Drupal. I also like the modular and extensible design.

I'm not sure how the database back-end can be customized, however. I'd really like a drill-down hierarchy like Manufacturers -> Models -> Products -> SKUs in the catalog. I like Lyle's manufacturer module. Can Ubercart be modified to support this kind of data structure?

Also, I'm confused as to how DE could get approved to support Google Checkout when it has all these problems and you guys have to wait for approval. It sounds like there is some politics involved. I sure wish Google would open their eyes and see how much brighter the future is for Ubercart.

Hierarchy is easy, that can be taken care of with Taxonomy and Views.

I'm not sure if any of the tutorial videos for UC cover taxonomy, to tell you the truth - but the fact that you'd be using it with a cart system, let alone Ubercart, is inconsequential. You can use Taxonomy with any node type, which is what makes it so powerful.

The main thing is to create the vocab in Taxonomy. Download that module and read its documentation - it'll help you understand more. You can create a single hierarchy such as what you described, or you can create a multi-tier hierarchy where products belong to multiple categories or subcats.

The only issue I'm aware of, though, seems to be with the Pathauto module generating aliases for every term or vocabulary; currently it seems to only create an alias for the first category ... but I haven't had time to test this myself.

Since Taxonomy is the main thing you need here, I would try to tinker with it and familiarize yourself first. If you still need help be sure to post back

Hi torgos,
I tried to figure out taxonomies (aka categories/vocabularies?) and how they relate to the Catalog and Manufacturer modules. The thing I'm getting hung up on now is how to relate Manufacturers to the Catalog. What I'd really like to do is create a hierarchy like Manufacturers -> Machines -> Components where manufacturers and machines would be listed under the appropriate level and Products would be listed under Components in the Catalog. Do I need to create a Manufacturer term in Catalog or can I tie in the Manufacturer vocabulary somehow? I'm really curious how some other folks came up with a workable hierarchy similar to what I'm trying to do.

Thanks Lyle,
Is there a way to populate the term_data, term_hierarchy and term_lineage tables from an already populated uc_manufacturers table using SQL? The reason I ask is the term_lineage data looks kinda funky in the lineage field and I'd hate to have to populate all this data manually since there are over 200 manufacturers.

Thanks for comments from everyone. I found the Taxonomy Manager module most useful for designing a catalog hierarchy. Drupal and Ubercart rule!