[development] Replacing the UC cart

[Jeff Greenberg]

I have a client running on a D6 site that is a combination of flash 
animation and Drupal content. They decided at the start that they didn't 
want to go the e-commerce route per se, they wanted product pages that 
fed an online order form that gets e-mailed, despite my advising them 
that they would probably want to do otherwise later, and that they were 
not positioning themselves to ease the transition.


The product page has a 'cast' of flash animated product thumbnails, and 
the current product as a large flash animation. A 'baseball' card of 
Drupal content provides the product info, and a quantity field, which 
when submitted provides 'add-to-cart' functionality.


The client now wants e-commerce, in terms of an order, payment and 
shipping. They want to retain the product page and the order form as the 
'cart.'  Those two existing functions are done via a custom module, so 
I'm thinking that with the 'add-to-cart' functionality I might be able 
to just change the form name to the one Ubercart uses, if necessary, and 
replace the content of the standard form. What I'm wondering about is 
using the online order form as the cart. It looks like image cart 
detail, with more columns and some ship-to/bill-to data. I can remove 
the ship-to/bill-to fields and use UC's at order time, but in using this 
form as the cart, has anyone any tips/pitfalls?  Loosely, not having 
dived into it yet, I'm thinking of 'simply' making use of the UC cart 
callbacks and ensuring I pass the correct data along...but it's probably 
not that straight-forward.


Jeff