Ask Freelock: integrating e-commerce into your site

Marc asks:

I am building an ecommerce site in Joomla using Virtue Mart as shopping cart to sell MP3 downloads of original music; small site but fun (doing in my spare time)
Using Virtue Mart but has some distinct limitations; any other suggestions for carts that integrate seamlessly with Joomla?

Hi, Marc,

In my experience, nothing integrates seamlessly with Joomla. That's why we switched to Drupal ;-)

yes, i have heard similar things about Joomla but my dev guy is more familiar with Joomla...how much of a learning curve is it for Drupal if someone knows Joomla?

The learning curve with Drupal is all around getting started -- there's a ton of best practices and knowledge about how to make it work for you that you only gain through experience. It's a bit of its own beast, and we've picked up a lot of projects from companies who started with somebody just learning Drupal and got in over their heads.

This is not necessarily a question of how to code -- it's a question of when to code, and what extra modules to deploy to get the functionality you're looking for. Our typical Drupal 6 site has perhaps 40 - 45 non-core modules installed. And as important as knowing what modules to deploy is knowing what modules not to deploy. There are a lot of dead ends in the Drupal contribution tree.