Drupal e-Commerce

Drupal E-Commerce is a very big system, in fact sometimes I think that it is larger than Drupal itself, and because it is not one of the sexy modules like views, cck, or the main Drupal system it can at times be a very thankless exercise to maintain and creating new developments.

There are currently 4 maintainers which do a wonderful job in upgrading and maintaining E-Commerce, and all of this at the moment is done with no or very little remuneration to help cover the time involved. With the release of v3.0 the all of the developers worked extremely long hours on top of their other projects, and this was reflected by the fact that the E-Commerce project was the top project, and all of the maintainers were the top maintainers for over 6 weeks.

The money that is received from the donations and sponsoring of development is not used primarily for paying the E-Commerce maintainers for time to maintain and upgrade the system from one version of Drupal to the next, but to help pay the maintainers or other developers to build new and better functionality into the E-Commerce system.

Also this money will be used to sponsor other developments outside of E-Commerce which help make E-Commerce a better system. The main one is the Drupal project module which without the great changes made by Derek Wright (dww) we would not have been able to create such a great release.

If you choose to sponsor development by paying $US5.00/mth this will help to cover more or less 1 hour of development per year which will allow us to implement better ways for the people using E-Commerce to sell their products and services.

The last major development that was done for E-Commerce was the rewrite of the recurring invoices for E-Commerce, and this was done via a reverse bounty which did allow the development to be completed, but the money raised did not cover the cost of development. So doing development based upon a donations and sponsoring method this should not happen.

E-Commerce is still 100% open source, and people who use it have absolutely no obligation to to pay any money to us. But making donations or sponsoring development means that you help ensure that E-Commerce will only get better and better and fit more peoples needs, now and into the future.

Thank you to everyone who uses the Drupal E-Commerce system, and any help in any way is always most appreciated.

Gordon Heydon.
Drupal E-Commerce Lead Maintainer.