If you are looking for an affordable silo structured e-commerce solution for your website, the Ubercart module for Drupal may be the perfect option for you. Because it incorporates Drupal's taxonomy system, it is easy to set up your categories and products while taking advantage of the internal linking structure and LSI enhanced URLs.

Over the last year, momentum for Ubercart's development has taken great strides to address issues found in the older EC module that kept Drupal from being a competitive e-commerce platform. The robust system can manage selling physical products from any size catalog, file downloads and memberships.

Key features include:

• Configurable catalog that can support subcategories at any level.
• Flexible product creation and attributes
• Single page checkout
• Anonymous checkout
• Simple order process
• Integrated payment systems
• Activity logging
• XML import/export

It's framework has been developed to work seamlessly with Drupal's core and can be extended with contributed modules and themes.

Installing Ubercart

This e-commerce suite is currently available only for Drupal 5x, but work has already begun to port the necessary modules to D6.

Before you decide to install Ubercart on an existing Drupal site, make sure that you do not already have the older E-Commerce package installed. The two systems have overlapping URLs and database tables that will cause it to function improperly. It's not enough to simply disable the E-commerce module or delete the files from your module directory. You have to manually remove any trace of it from your database, along with clearing your cache tables. For more information on how to do this, go to installation FAQ. It's a huge headache, but it can be done. Contact me if you need assistance with this.

If you want to install Drupal and Ubercart at the same time, you can use the UberInstaller which will install all Drupal files and Ubercart modules, run the installer script and set up the first account. The installer will not work on an existing Drupal site.

Ubercart requires additional modules:
Tables API (TAPIr)
uBrowser
Token
Workflow-ng

For product images:
CCK
Image Field
Imagecache

There are 4 core modules that are required to operate a store on your site. In Administer > Site Building > Modules, check Cart, Order, Product, and Store. Under core (optional), you will want to at least select Catalog and Payment. The rest of the options will be specific to your store needs. For more info, go to Ubercart for more details about each module.

Enable the rest of the required modules in the list above.

To configure Ubercart:

• Set up a role for the store admin at Administer > User Management > Roles. Set permissions for this role.
• Turn on store,shopping cart, and catalog blocks. For the store block, click on configure and click the store admin role. This will will only display the store admin links for those with the right permissions.
• Click on Store Admin to make sure there are no errors in the installation and fix any if there are.
• To adjust the settings for your store, visit Configuring Ubercart for more detail about each option.
• Go to Administer > Site building > Themes > Configure where you can uncheck the box to display post information on products.

Setting up your catalog.

Ubercart's catalog is built on Drupal's taxonomy system, making it easy to categorize your products into appropriate silos while taking advantage of the internal linking structure and semantic data in your URLs.

Set up your product categories (silos) by browsing to Administer > Content Management > Category and add terms to the Catalog vocabulary.

To create a multi-level catalog that contains unlimited subcategories, click on "edit vocabulary" for your catalog and make sure that Hierarchy is set to Multiple. When you add your category terms, you can select where it belongs in the hierarchy under the Parent multi-select form.

If you have enabled the image modules for Ubercart, you can also upload an image that represents the products in each category. Note that nothing will appear in your catalog until you add products to the system. The menu links appear in the Catalog block and by default contain the number of products listed in each category. The silo linking structure is built into this menu (similar to the Book Module), the breadcrumb structure and the taxonomy tags that appear on each post dependant on your theme.

If you have set up Pathauto to take advantage of taxonomy, your product URLs will generate "catalog_term/product_name". The Pathauto module will add an additional setting specific to the Catalog vocabulary. You can either keep the same setting as the Category option, or add a general store description before the category token to different it from the rest of the site. If you want to include the name of the vocabulary, you token string would be [vocab-raw]/[catpath-raw].

You can adjust additional settings for your catalog by browsing to Administer » Store administration » Configuration. Here you can specify the number of products to display per page, turn off product number counts in the menu links, and change the settings for breadcrumbs and subcategories.