So, you want to be an internet millionaire? Given the low barriers to entry, small capital outlays and lots of sweat equity, you can surely give it a shot. While there is no guarantee of blockbuster success, many have supplemented incomes or quit their day jobs selling their wares and services via eCommerce. The most widely used tool for enabling eCommerce on Drupal is the Ubercart Module.

Ubercart is a free Open Source module that is fully integrated with Drupal. It allows for selling physical goods, file downloads like music/software and even event registrations like concert tickets. Additionally, there is a huge variety of supported Payment Systems (http://www.ubercart.org/payment).

Let's go ahead and download, then install Ubercart. Note: The Ubercart Module has a module dependency on the Token Module. Please proceed on installing Token Module as a prerequisite if you haven't done so already. You can either download it to your local PC with your web browser, then FTP it to /home/public_html/sites/all/modules or we can just download and extract it from the console.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all$ cd modules
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/modules$ 
                   sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/token-6.x-1.12.tar.gz
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/modules$ 
                   sudo tar zxvf token-6.x-1.12.tar.gz

The contents of the archive will be extracting to /home/public_html/sites/all/modules/token. The next portion of the module setup requires us to use our web browser. We'll need to be logged into Drupal with an administrator account to enable new modules. On the navigation menu select Administer.

The Administer section is divided up into five major task categories; Content management, Site building, Site configuration, User management and Reports. Within the Site building task category, we want to select Modules.

Drupal will scan the directories /home/public_html/modules and /home/public_html/sites/all/modules, any new modules found will be listed in collapsible menu categories outside of the two preinstalled collapsible menus (Core - optional & Core - required). Note: If you do not see the new module listed it may be that you extracted the archive into the wrong path or do not have the appropriate permissions (read) on the directory.

Go ahead and enable the Token Module from the Other collapsible menu. There are couple other small Token Module components we will not be using at this time. For site performance reasons, we will not enable the optional modules until a later time when we actually need them. Scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Save configuration button.

With the Token Module in place we can now proceed with the download and extraction of Ubercart.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all$ cd modules
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/modules$ 
                 sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/ubercart-6.x-2.2.tar.gz
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/modules$ 
                 sudo tar zxvf ubercart-6.x-2.2.tar.gz

The contents of the archive will be extracting to /home/public_html/sites/all/modules/ubercart. Now that Ubercart Module and it's dependencies have been installed, we are ready to begin configuration. If we navigate to Administer, Sitebuilding... Modules on our web browser we'll find five new collapsible menus, Ubercart: core, core (optional), extra, fulfillment and payment.

Since the Ubercart Module is probably one of the biggest and most feature rich modules available for Drupal we will reserve the explanation of features and available options until the next lesson, eCommerce on Drupal with Ubercart Module - Configuration.

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