On the Developer Tutorials site today, there's a new look at working with the Drupal e-Commerce module in your Drupal installation.

What if you [also] want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds - shopping carts and CMSs? Fortunately, the answer is yes, if you choose a world-class CMS such as Drupal as a foundation for your site.

They walk you through how to get the module installed, how to configure it to match with your site's layout and flow and how to hook the purchase process into PayPal to make purchasing a few simple user clicks away.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico has written up a bit of a "history of PHP applications" since 1998 that have changed the community (and the online world) by being released.

From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date.

Among those on the list are things like SquirrelMail (1999), phpBB (2000), Drupal (2001) and WordPress (2003). More lately things like frameworks and content management systems have been popular and are being developed with more structure and better standards than some of their predecessors.

On his blog today, Vinu Thomas spotlights one of the major up and comers in the PHP-based eCommerce software package offerings - Magento.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

php|architect has announced the release of a new book - the Guide to Programming Magento, now up for preorder:

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

On the Developer Tutorials website, there's a new guide that steps you through the installation of a simple e-commerce platform available for free from Devellion Limited.

In this tutorial, we will get an introduction to CubeCart, created and distributed by Devellion Limited. Their flagship product is one of the easiest low-cost e-commerce solutions available, and is growing in popularity. Note that CubeCart is not technically open source, since the code cannot be freely redistributed. On the other hand, most of the code is not protected using encoding, and can thus be read and understood.

They go through the selection process - picking which version of their software is right for you - and the installation, configuration and how to verify that everything's up and running smoothly. Screenshots are included to help along the way.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest in their "ZendCon Sessions" podcast series - a talk from Elizabeth Naramore about PHP and E-Commerce applications.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Elizabeth Naramore present "PHP and E-Commerce: More Than Just a Shopping Cart".

There's three ways to get this fresh new episode - you can subscribe to the feed for the podcast and have the episodes delivered to you, or can download the mp3 of the talk or you can listen right on the page via an embedded player.

Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.

My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.

According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.

Following up from a previous entry, Mike Willbanks has posted some clarifications on points previously made and the highlights on what he thinks a good framework should entail.

I decided to clarify and also explain some of my thoughts and ideas that an e-commerce framework should hold. These thoughts and ideas may be a little rough around the edges but I wanted to give a definition to the meaning of what I feel a framework is in this case as well as items that would potentially be a part of this framework.

Some of his requirements are things like reusable design, useful/easy to use components, functionality for both payment processing and courier handling as well as a catalog system to help manage items.

While frameworks seem to be popping out of the woodwork, Mike Willbanks has noticed something lacking - a good e-commerce framework that helps the developer do simple things like work with shopping carts or connect with payment APIs.

So here is my question, besides the really shitty shopping cart objects out there is there any true components for a framework that utilizes this functionality? I say shitty shopping cart objects because just about every single open source PHP shopping cart has some of the worst design aspects I have ever seen.

His complaint is that most of the shopping cart software out there is really just procedural (or bad) code shoved into classes and called good. He suggests a more patterned approach - maybe using a Factory on top of a base abstract model.