Tag Archives: CMS

Why I chose Ubercart instead of Magento or osCommerce.

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About a year ago a friend asked me why I chose the Ubercart/Drupal combo as the engine for Cool Cavemen’s online shop. He specifically asked me why not choose Magento or osCommerce. I never really took the time to answer him. Let’s fix this.

First, I selected a couple of web eCommerce solution based on the same requirements upon which I choose WordPress some years ago. Namely:

  • Open-source free software
  • Active project
  • Healthy community

I excluded osCommerce right away. I quickly played with it in 2005 and in 2007 for projects that never came to fruition. And I keep a really bad memory of these experiences: both code and templates felt poorly designed and implemented. That’s why osCommerce is classified in my brain as a giant legacy code base, hard to maintain. Maybe the project has evolved a lot since then. I should have looked back at it, but was attracted by another project…

…which was Magento. So yes, I seriously considered to use Magento at some point. It looked great. And clean. But digging deeper I found that something was missing.

My shop was supposed to sell tee-shirts for the band. And a tee-shirt is a product that can have lots of variations:

  • different colors (white, black, yellow, …),
  • of different sizes (S, M, L, X, XL, …),
  • in different shapes (teeshirt, hoodie, sweatshirt, …),
  • for different peoples (guy, girl, baby, …).

I wanted to track stocks and prices for each combination. And this degree of complexity is not supported by Magento. To be fair, I remember to have heard of this feature, but was only available in a third party module (that I don’t remember the name). Alas, this module was proprietary. That is the main reason I discarded Magento.

And then I found Ubercart, which allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. Here is for example prices and stocks for a black Cool Cavemen tee-shirt:

I use Ubercart since 2008 and I’m really happy with it. The future is interesting, as Ubercart was forked as the Drupal Commerce project a year ago. I’m waiting for the 1.0 release of the latter to decide if it is worth switching to the fork or not. But having it based on Drupal 7 is good news, as Ubertcart still stick to the (old) Drupal 6.

e107 Importer 1.1 available !

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A month after the 1.0 release, here is my e107 Importer v1.1 for WordPress !

The biggest new feature is support of e107 forum import to the bbPress WordPress plugin. This plugin is still in alpha and was not released yet. This mean you have to fetch it from its Subversion repository. And be careful to get the recommended version (SVN release 2942).

Because of the experimental status of forum import, the default option of e107 Importer is to not import forums. I decided to include this feature anyway to get feedbacks. So please don’t consider forum import as a highly reliable. It may work for you or may not. And please write detailed bug reports.

Here is a detailed changelog between 1.0 and 1.1:

  • Add import of forums and threads to bbPress WordPress plugin.
  • Parse BBCode and e107 constants in forums and thread.
  • Add forums and threads redirections.
  • Make e107 user import optional. This needs you to set a pre-existing WordPress user that will take ownership of all imported content.
  • Parse BBCode in titles too.
  • Import images embedded in comments and forum threads.
  • Description update of existing users is no longer destructive.
  • Add an entry in the FAQ regarding script ending prematurely.
  • Disable all extra HTML rendering hooks like the one coming from e107 linkwords plugin.
  • Allow news and pages import to be skipped.
  • Add missing news category redirects.
  • Minimal requirement set to WordPress 3.1.
  • Some pages are not tied to a user. In this case, default to the current user.

e107 Importer WordPress plugin v1.0 released !

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After 3 years in limbo, here is a new stable version of my e107 Importer plugin for WordPress, proudly numbered 1.0 ! :)

This is the first time this plugin is available on the official WordPress plugin repository. This means easy upgrades for you ! :)

I’ve heavily updated the plugin to use the latest WordPress import framework, so everything is now cleanly integrated.

This version was tested with e107 v0.7.24 and WordPress 3.1-RC3.

Here is the changelog:

A note for developpers: the reference code base is now located on GitHub. That’s were all new code must be commited. WordPress’ Subversion repository is only a mirror.

If any question, please read the FAQ first.

FeedBurner and e107 integration

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In the context of my plan to move an e107-based website to WordPress, I need to take care of my RSS subscribers. To let people (and search engines) get my content via old URLs, I will use Apache redirections to do this transparently and permanently. My final goal is to have a WordPress website with all RSS feeds (blog posts and comments) managed by FeedBurner, to gather statistics about my audience.

Actually there is plenty of feeds format available in e107 (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF) and one feed can be accessed through multiple URLs. We will reduce this incredible mess by using RSS 2.0 feeds only and redirect all others to it.

First, check that the e107 RSS feed plugin is activated. Then create an account on FeedBurner and setup there two feeds, one for your website’s news and another one for comments. Based on default e107 parameters, your news feed URL is like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1.2 and comments feed like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5.2.

Then, create (or edit) the http://www.my-domain.com/.htaccess file, and add following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(5|Comments)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments? [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(1|News|.*)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed? [R=301,L]

This code is inspired by the one written by Mike Atlas, who had a similar issue and wanted to outsource his e107 forum RSS feeds to FeedBurner.

The first rewrite rule will redirect all URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5 or http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?Comments to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments.

The second rewrite rule will redirect all other URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php (including http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1 and http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?News) to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed.

That’s all ! Thanks to this server-side redirection, nobody will notice that the feeds have moved and no subscriber will be bothered to update their aggregator.

In my case, the only remaining task to do is to move my e107 website to WordPress then install FeedSmith plugin. But that’s another story… ;)

e107 to WordPress v0.8: import images and preferences

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The 8th version of my e107 to WordPress import script is out ! This version is quite special because this is the first one that support all features I planned to implement in the road map I write for the first alpha release.

Here is the changelog:

  • Import images embedded in e107 news and custom pages,
  • Import e107 site preferences (like site name and description),
  • Better import of user profile data,
  • An existing user on the blog can be detected and updated automatically,
  • Fix the profanity filter bug,
  • Tested with latest WordPress 2.1.3.

WordPress to e107 v0.6: Better Content Rendering and Extended News support

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Here is the version 0.6 of my tool to import e107 content in WordPress. Comparing to v0.5, this 6th alpha version render content as it is rendered in e107 thanks to the use of user’s website preferences. This release also handle news extended part nicely (look at screenshot), and is built to work with the latest e107 v0.7.6 and WordPress 2.0.5.