Got another Drupal project booked… this time I’ll be using UberCart instead of OsCommerce. UberCart is a native Drupal module that offers comprehensive e-commerce features to the platform. UberCart does require some effort to configure and it really doesn’t work straight out of the box (unlike OsCommerce) but it takes full advantage of all the common Drupal goodies – CCK, View, taxonomy… Check back for more updates, and I’ll be posting my codes as the project moves on.

Previous employer (Alternatives Journal) is teaming up with Magazine Canada and Zinio.com to offer digital magazines. This will probably make my custom OsCommerce platform obsolete… but it’ll be interesting to learn how Zinio operates. Zinio is giving these magazines a very sweet deal and I was surprised to learn that most of their services are free (for the duration of the contract – 2 years).

I got the feel that they are trying to suck in as many clients as possible by offering free incentives to publishers and customers. However, a glance at their UI left me with much to desire. I didn’t see any innovative features at all… at the end it just felt like another Flashpaper viewer with embedded PDFs. When compared to more polished services like  issuu.com,  Zinio has some work to do.

I still haven’t seen any paperwork from Zinio, but the challenge will be to mesh our existing e-commerce effort with their system. Customer databases need to be synced… financial reports need to be combined and analyzed…. all the fun stuff.  Expect more updates.

Take a look at the site I built for Alternatives Journal – http://www.alternativesjournal.ca (Drupal site)