Episode 13: Centarro and Drupal Commerce with Ryan Szrama
This week, Oliver is joined by Ryan Szrama, CEO of Centarro, to discuss Drupal Commerce, Commerce Kickstart, Mario Kart and the dreaded cache_form table.
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)
