Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

I've been having some discussions with Travis from Hop Studios about ecommerce. Hop Studios are ExpressionEngine experts, and also good friends of mine. EE, as I've written about before, is a very capable CMS with a custom data builder much like Drupal's content construction kit (CCK). Its only failing is that it's not open source :P

I've been Twittering a bit about ecommerce, so people have been asking what I'm up to. The motivation is that I've recently had occasion to dig into ecommerce with two clients -- one where it looks like their current 'store' will need to be replaced, the other has just some simple PayPal buttons today.

I put 'store' in quotes, because it's not really a store today ... it's kind of a glorified cart. I did a presentation a year ago where I talked about the 3 Stages of Dynamic Web Sites, and this got me to thinking about ecommerce tools. I have very little experience running or implementing ecommerce, but as I began to look around, it's clear that they roughly break down into 3 stages as well.

1) Hosted pay buttons

This is the PayPal "Buy Now" or Google Checkout. In those hosted systems, you define a "product" and it generates code you can stick on your site. No inventory, limited or no "dynamic" options, no ability to "keep shopping" or anything like that. The plus side is that it works everywhere and has little to no set up costs -- it's all per transaction.

Use this if you have a handful of products. It's great to get up and running IMMEDIATELY -- if you have product to sell, don't wait: start trying to sell it and refine your techniques and workflow. Anything else like automation, fulfillment, etc. can wait -- start selling and shipping your stuff to see if it sells. If you have high traffic that you are overwhelmed...you've also got the money from selling to invest in better tools.

2) Carts

These can be little scripts you install locally, or be hosted as well (e.g. FoxyCart, which is something I found through Travis because it integrates with EE as FoxEE). There are a probably hundreds of options, with integration with many different system. They are again different levels of integration into sites -- the critical factor is often trying to make sure there is one login rather than a dual login system. Carts that can support a single login or login integration with the "host" dynamic system (EE, WordPress, etc.) start edging up into the category of full stores.

Use a cart if you have a larger number of products, especially complimentary products where you might want to buy two items together, or keep browsing the site and let people buy multiple items. The lower end carts are only a bit more sophisticated than pay now buttons, and as I mentioned, the higher end carts are similar to full stores. Carts don't usually have the full analytics, specials, inventory, and full member logins that stores do.

3) Stores

There are many full store scripts as well. I'm most interested in the mid range stores. They are open source or low cost, are relatively full featured with memberships, have good extensibility so you can customize them or integrate them as needed. They are platforms that can grow with you. Oh, and as per usual, I'm biased towards open source solutions :P

I had heard lots of good things about Elastic Path (they're a local Vancouver success story). So I headed over to their site. Luckily, they have a very good sales guide, and their cost page answered all my questions in two easy sentences. One was "If your annual online revenue is less than $5 million, Elastic Path Commerce is probably too expensive for you", and secondly "If you're looking for free (or nearly free) open-source platforms or entry-level hosted solutions, Elastic Path Commerce is probably not for you". Great -- I think it's fantastic when companies help you self select AWAY from them.

osCommerce is the grand daddy here -- it has had a bad rap for design and funky code. I think I can safely say its built with "older" techniques, and I don't see a from the ground rewrite happening any time soon. I've toyed with it in the past, and I just don't see it as anything other than a legacy app.

Magento Ecommerce is the company / software I've had my eye on. The front page says "fastest growing ecommerce package" with 525K downloads. It's licensed under the Open Software License (OSL) 3.0. And yep, I hadn't heard of it before either -- there's an explanatory PDF with more info if you're interested in open source licensing details.

There's a WordPress integration plugin, and a large community of extensions from open source to commercial in the Magento Connect marketplace. While Magento is open source, it's mixed license and stewardship by one commercial company may make less technical users feel more comfortable. You can even buy support contracts starting at $42 / month -- this is a no brainer both for consultants deploying Magento, and for customers whose livelihood depends on the software.

Lastly, Drupal-based solutions. Drupal's strength at a very high level has always been two things: 1) you can get a single login and access many different functions from community to ecommerce and 2) it's really extensible, so either through configuration or clean programming, you can customize the base solutions. Both of these are good features for ecommerce stores. There is the original Drupal Ecommerce package, and the newer Ubercart team.

The downside is that Drupal is not, at this point, a drop in and configure your store. I can see Ubercart edging in that direction. I've been bugging them for quite some time to do an install profile...the next piece of "just" an install profile would be an install profile "wizard" that walks you through setting up different types of stores. That being said, there are lots of examples of Ubercart-powered stores.

Update 2: I got lots of feedback from Drupal folks that read my site. @gheydon, author of the Drupal Ecommerce package, said on Twitter "I have been working a lot on e-Commerce and it is trimmed down a lot, and will have a very basic store by def ault, and expand on it" There is also a list of Drupal Ecommerce showcase sites.

@mikey_p pointed out another advantage of a full Drupal solution on Twitter "The downside as a developer 4 dual platform CMS + Store is learning 2 systems. w/ Drupal solutions, I cn theme th e store & site both."

In the comments, stephthegeek from Top Notch Themes pointed to an Acquia + Ubercart install profile...that's what *I* was thinking about, so I'll be watching it eagerly...

When should you run a full store solution? Well, you've got a mix of content and community, you sell a larger number of products, you need inventory control, and you intend to keep investing in the technology that runs your store.

In a  fourth category, you've got many different ways to sell items on various hosted services. For examples, lots of artists and craftspeople use Etsy to run a store and sell their products. The newly launched Foodzie specializes in being a sort of mall for "artisanal" food-related stores and products. Actually, there are probably again a couple of hundred more in this category -- Shopify in Calgary, etc. etc.

I'm specifically not very interested in these types of hosted "mall" systems (in this article) unless you can map a CNAME or otherwise use a web address under your own control: ecommerce is all about driving web traffic across buy buttons, and pushing that traffic to someone else's domain may not be in your best interest. The best of these would offer APIs to have the benefits of a full store functionality that is maintained for you, as well as integration directly into your own site / domain.

Update: got some feedback from @jbillingsley (thanks!) that I should probably include eBay and Amazon in this fourth area, since you can do a variety of hosted stores and other types of sales. Again, this area I'm specifically not really focusing on -- I want stuff that you can integrate extensively into your own site and domain.

To me, ecommerce feels like there is still a lot of room for innovation. There is now little to no hesitancy about buying online (compared to earlier times). Once your store is up and running, you can use marketing and analytics to costly be tuning how much money you make: you are in control. It kind of feels like the early days of online advertising.

I'm leaning towards Magento as something worthwhile to spend more time with. It's open source (although I really do need to know what exactly the OSL means to me), it is a full out of the box store solution (I installed it via their public SVN repository, which impressed me), and it has a history of integration with content management systems.

I'd like to hear about other people's experience with ecommerce scripts, especially if they are open source stores.

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

First up, I'm going to do the call out of upcoming Vancouver events:

• Wednesday, April 30th (tonight!) is WordPress Camp, put on by the folks at Tazzu - I've got Dad night every other Wednesday so I won't be making it this time. Maybe someone should set up a Vancouver WordPress Users Group and do this regularly? VanWUG!
• May 9th and 10th is DrupalCamp Vancouver - I'll be talking about install profiles and likely a "getting started with Drupal" talk where I go through all the core modules; more on this in a full post
• early June date TBD DemoCampVancouver07 - back to the "regular" format of 30 second pitches and voting on stage for full talks; maybe we'll do this right after the F&F event

Check Miss 604 for another recent event round up.

In general, I'll mostly be doing full descriptions of events that I'm hosting / help organize around startups will be over at the Bootup Labs blog. Coming soon there is a Vancouver Founders and Funders in June after the Toronto event.

OK, on to the topic of "one calendar". Or rather, a consolidated calendar. There really are a lot of events going on in Vancouver, and it's hard to schedule new ones, it's hard to get a central overview of them, and it's hard / annoying to cross post Upcoming / Facebook / wikis / etc. Several people coming to DemoCampVancouver have said something along the lines of "I'm new in town, how do I find out about more events". Answers like "read these 10 peoples' blogs isn't really a solution.

I had lunch with Rob Lewis from TechVibes the other week. TechVibes continues to work on re-vamping their site (they'll be going through a major re-tooling over the summer) and we came around to the subject of events.

TechVibes has an events calendar, but it's painful. Yeah, they know it :P We talked about adding value there, specifically getting the community involved and providing something of value that the wider community could get involved with and rally around (e.g. not a TechVibes direct "property" per se).

I came up with two concepts.

One is for TechVibes to enable cross posting from TechVibes to Upcoming and other sites (Facebook? can anything post an event to Facebook using the API?). Post in one spot, get cross posting goodness "for free", which sounds like a good reason to post to TechVibes for those of us organizing and promoting events.

In general, I'm a fan of Upcoming. As Brendon said, it's great to use in San Francisco, since it's got full coverage of everything from tech events to arts. Here in Vancouver, coverage is a little spotty. I try and enter everything there because it is on the public web with a permalink (as opposed to Facebook...).

The second concept is around TechCouver. Buzz Bishop is leading the media charge to make this another Vancouver nickname - and that's great. So let's make TechCouver a local aggregator of tech-related blog posts and events.

The map is great as well, and we could use both. Basically, have tech companies and bloggers enter a listing for themselves including an RSS feed. We aggregate all the feeds, and run our own TechMeme for Vancouver. Well, minus the secret algorithm -- I'd like to do voting so we can see "best of" posts as well as the "river of news" of recent stuff.

So, one central spot for tech related postings and events, one central spot we can direct people to, to find out what's happening in TechCouver.

What do you think? Is this interesting? Useful to you? Would you visit it? Would you subscribe to it and/or use the OPML file it would generate? Let's use this TechCouver wiki page to discuss features and such, or comment here.

Matt Mullenweg had to make a pretty clear statement that WordPress is Open Source in response to some sniping from MT.

I already left a comment in support of Matt, and he tossed it back my way:

Thanks Boris, I think the way Drupal and WordPress have co-existed is a great model to follow despite a few distractions along the way, and your role in facilitating that as an ambassador has been crucial. It’s rare for code for one project to be directly applicable to another, but ideas and values are contagious — in the good Isley Brothers way.

I know how this can be. We flirted with dual licensing around Bryght's mass hosting system, Hostmaster. In hindsight, it probably delayed development by 2 years. Now hosted on Drupal.org, Hostmaster has a couple of more developers buying in and it feels like we're developing some momentum.

We made a Bryght "install profile" -- a bundle of code and configuration and a little custom module for doing some cool stuff with CSS overrides. From day one, it's been hosted on our public SVN repository, and includes the original CVS tags from Drupal.org itself.

It was amusing to watch that MT4 actually had as a feature that other systems had adopted their templating system -- namely a single contributed module in Drupal that can support MT themes for bloggy sites.

Basically, sniping other open projects isn't cool. In the first meetings that the Drupal community ever had as a group, in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we had Joomla community members and senior devs. It was so fun playing with the Joomla guys and matching t-shirts and groups shots with Rasmus at OSCMS 2007. Amy Stephens +1 -- check out Open Source Community.

The "enemy" here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

I ran a couple of not really that successful because they were TOO Drupal heavy "Open Source CMS Summits". I'd love to do more of them, because we have so much to learn from each other, but we are all so focused on growing our own communities, each bit of *friendly* rivalry pushing the others to get better. Like the Isley Brothers :P

Recall the rant I had on guest posting. I was recently looking at my GigaOm subscribtion again, and was preparing to get all pissy about not being able to subscribe just to Om Malik.

Except, of course, since they're using Wordpress and have actually set up separate authors, it's actually built in functionality.

So, if you want to read all posts by Om, just subscribe to this feed: http://gigaom.com/?feed=rss2&author=om-malik

I feel so much happier now that I can have Om delivered just for me. That's not to say that postings by Liz Gannes et al aren't good (quite the opposite, in fact). But in my mind, the mixing of author posts was diluting the "voice" that I heard from Om. Not having interacted with the other authors as much, it will take me more time to recognize their voice and style as belonging to a particular person. Otherwise, it's just news.

Roland is making a big move. Switching blogging platforms (Radio to Movable Type), switching hosting platforms (Windows to Linux), then moving his host to a co-lo. Wow!

This is a Big Job™. Good luck with everything, Roland.