Centarro and Drupal Commerce with Ryan Szrama

March 3rd, 2024

This week on Beyond Blocks, I'mj oined by Ryan Szrama, CEO of Centarro, to discuss Drupal Commerce, Commerce Kickstart, Mario Kart and the dreaded cache_form table.

Listen to the episode now.

Key points

• eCommerce, Ubercart and Drupal Commerce.
• How Commerce Guys started.
• How Ryan started in the eCommerce space.
• The origins of Drupal Commerce and Commerce Guys.
• Commerce Kickstart.

Quotes

• The best code isn't the most novel or most compact, it's the most easily readable and easily extendable (RS).
• My only resource for learning PHP was php.net (RS)
• I'm a self-taught Developer or community-taught, I suppose (OD).
• Porting osCommerce into Drupal, which became Ubercart (RS).
• Do we do this in Ubercart and Drupal 6 that we know works, or this new thing that was Drupal Commerce in Drupal 7 (OD).
• It was built in Ubercart and was in production until quite recently, considering we're in 2024 (OD).
• Once you get thoroughly entrenched in a platform, the cost to re-platform outweighs the cost of maintaining it in-house (RS).
• If there's 10,000 of anybody, they're going to want to pay for support (RS).
• How do we convince them to invest in an upgrade that doesn't see them jettison Drupal entirely? (RS)
• One thing I like about Drupal Commerce is its flexibility. (OD)
• It doesn't need to be a t-shirt or book shop. You can do some outside the box things with it. (OD)
• Being a native extension of Drupal has a lot more advantages and pros than cons. (RS)
• Ubercart was more "batteries included" and "this is what it does", whereas Drupal Commerce is more flexible and although it requires a bit more setup to begin with, you can plug it together the way you want to. (OD)
• Our vision was to go the next step of getting off the Drupal island. (RS)
• The Commerce Addressing library is now over 17,000,000 downloads. (OD)
• Composer allowed us to separate our projects and separate our concerns. (RS)
• Do you know when you should not use Views and when you decouple that component and use JavaScript and the REST API? (RS)
• If we can reduce the number of times introduce those kinds of problems, that's how I would certify somebody. (RS)

- Oliver

P.S. There's less than a year until Drupal 7's end-of-life date. Plan your upgrade to Drupal 10 now!