Ubercart

top site. I like the theme

Interesting site, great story about product development.

Two comments, first, the site is nice, but second, it 'seems' slow to load. I don't know why because otherwise, my connection speed seems OK on sites I usually frequent. Sorry for offering up such a vague impression.

Queries:
Are you still happy with drupal+ubercart?
Any regrets?
Any gotchas would you advise watching out for?
What other CMS/cart systems have you experience with?
Did you do it yourslef, or hire a developer?
Is the site it self-hosted, or 3rd party hosted?
Have hacker attacks ever been an issue?
Anything else worth sharing?

Thanks in advance.

Hi, sorry I didn't spot this reply to the initial post.

- The site should be reasonably quick, firebug page speed reports between 85/100 and 88/100 currently.

- No regrets at all, Drupal is amazing, the site has come on quite a bit since my post.

- Joomla, Wordpress, oscommerce

- I'm a developer freelancing for a client.

- Hosted on a dedicated server with dual cpu and 3gb ram along with a sister site.

- We get hacker attempts quite often via bots, I try and keep up to date with bot IPs and add them to my ban list in the .htaccess file to reduce load on the site

- I would advise decorating the checkout pages, this really helps with conversions.

Best of luck with any stores you end up building.

P.

Better late than never - thanks for taking time to respond!

You wrote . . . - We get hacker attempts quite often via bots, I try and keep up to date with bot IPs and add them to my ban list in the .htaccess file to reduce load on the site

How do you keep up to date with bot IPs so you may add them? What other steps can a site take to afford protection?

Frankly, we abandoned OSCommerce several years ago precisely because of the constant barrage of childish hackers taking down our site. After all, it's not like we're Amazon or the Pentagon (to be a worthwhile target of tomfoolery). In a way, it this was a net loss to OSCommerce and the open source community because we learned open source wasn't to be trusted. Thus, we opted instead for the easier security of quality commercial software (instead of untrustworthy open source).

I guess our greatest concern with using Drupal and a cart will be a repeat of this experience, e.g. a huge workload to keep the site secure. After all, we're two-man business trying to offer products during the worst recession of our lifetimes, and constantly changing the locks on the doors is the height of sillyness (e.g. for security at the core of the product so it's essentially a non-issue).

What I am asking is can we sign up for notification/implementation of security alerts, so maintenance becomes something of a routine task instead of an all consuming thing?

Hi, you're welcome.

Drupal is very secure, I've never had a 'real' concern for security ever on any of the sites I manage, the only concern I have with bot attacks is load on the site/server, they don't happen often but sometimes can last 10-20 minutes while they scour for pages such as /phpmyadmin, etc. - if this is happening at the same time as another load it can slow down the site. This applies to my IP address, not drupal, i.e. they're coming to scour around no matter what software I'm running.

There's a facility in drupal to view logs such as page not found, or php errors, very useful, these logs can provide you with ip addresses, I'll add any to the list that are known to be troublesome (research on google)

I noted you said open source wasn't to be trusted, I disagree, I've found the solution to many work challenges using open source, since 1999 and never looked back, my server runs linux not windows, etc.. In my opinion oscommerce wasn't professional enough when I quit using it a few years ago, I can tell you drupal is a far more serious player in the industry which requires time and dedication to be involved with if you're a developer. But as a light user, someone starting out, research how organised drupal.org is, how many modules there are, how many people contributing, conferences, videos, sponsors, users and more, it should help reduce any concerns you have about open source.

I'm sure you'll not look back if you go the drupal route, if it wasn't for drupal some of the magic I've created wouldn't have been possible. If you don't have the time to work on your site to bring out it's full potential, you should consider outsourcing, it can save a business a lot of time and money and is usually a very cost efficient way of moving forward. If your time is better spent elsewhere for the business it really makes sense. Try and find someone local if this is the case, always good to have a face-to-face technical relationships if you're a small business.

Wishing you a prosperous future.

Paul.

Paul,

Your comments vis-a-vis Drupal security are warming to the heart because when I read your orignal post I was filled with dread and instantly flashed on our experiences with OSConmmerce in 2005 time frame, which led to our abandoning it (due to constant security efforts required). Thank you for taking time to respond.

Meanwhile, my only remaining concern with Drupal is there is seems to be less activity versus Joomla, or restated, Joomla seems to be more popular. Thus, I wonder why this is. Regardless, while we have a test site with Joomla 1.6 and Virtumart with soem 50 products for testing, despite the little I've seen of Drupal 6, I like it better. Thus, I am eager to begin work using Drupal 7 and hoping Drupal Commerce comes up to speed quickly because I am not so implressed with Ubercart. I am just waiting a stable release.

Also, es, you are correct in noting I am merely a user (instead of a developer). However, I am a poor user, who probably cannot afford to pay a real developer what he/she is worth - or not pay too much - so I have to learn myself. it's OK, this is fun in many ways to learn new things.

Moreover, what's especially exciting is the impending release of D7 because it means learning something new, which won't be obsoleted as quickly. Not obsolete-obsolete, I mean obsolete only insofar as had we built a website on D6 in June I'd have to revisit it very soon because a lot of work would be involved in migrating to D7. E.g. because Views, CCK and others are being folded into core. Yes, I'm lazy and once a site is working I want to leave it alone and move on to the next one, not do major maintenance like migrating to a whole new version so soon after completion!

Anyway, thank you once again!

I think with Drupal the only limit is yourself, purely because of the flexible way in which you can pick and present data. However, it's not a speedy process and takes some experience building first. I've only used Joomla briefly and gave up half way through, for some reason it frustrated me and felt quite rigid but this was a couple of years ago so I'm unable to comment further. It would be handy to be up to speed with Joomla as I'd no doubt get more clients.

Here's an interesting thread with some useful comments. http://drupal.org/node/741366

Also looking forward to Drupal 7, exciting times ahead!

Have fun.
P.