What's Happening With Drupal Commerce in Drupal 8?

In the last few weeks, there's been some controversy in the Drupal community. Acquia launched a major partnership with Magento, which has left some people wondering about the support for Drupal Commerce. There had already been some nervousness, because Drupal Commerce 2 has been slow to arrive in Drupal 8.

So, what's happening with Drupal Commerce?

First, I would recommend you read Dries' post on Acquia's plans for e-commerce. "Open source e-commerce" by Maxime Topolov also has some useful background information.

Next, I'd highly recommend that you watch this video from Ryan Szarma, one of the lead developers of Drupal Commerce. This video was recorded at Drupal 8 Day. Ryan covers the history, architecture, and features of Drupal Commerce 2 on Drupal 8. There was a lot of interest in Ryan's presentation, with over 30 minutes of questions afterwards.

Overview of the Drupal Commerce video

Development on Drupal Commerce 2 began with a code sprint in July 2014.

First, Ryan and his team released a handful of standalone PHP libraries for tasks such as currency formats and addresses. Next, they created modules that made use of them, such as the new Address module.

Finally, they rebuilt Drupal Commerce itself from the ground up, taking full advantage of Drupal 8's new features.

This video gives you an overview of how they engineered Commerce 2.x to make it simpler to solve some of the hardest parts of eCommerce. 

Ryan includes both explanations and demonstrations of topics including:

• Installing Drupal Commerce and its dependencies
• Creating and configuring one or multiple stores
• Full support for currency and address formatting
• Adding product pages and their variants
• Customizing Add to Cart forms and Line Items
• Configuring the redesigned Checkout form
• Managing Payment methods and their new UI
• Managing Orders and their workflows

About the author

Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. He was a teacher for many years before starting OSTraining. Steve wrote the best-selling Drupal and Joomla books.