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Ubercart is arguably the leading ecommerce module suite for Drupal. It allows site admins to sell virtually just about anything online, including physical products, downloadable products, and event admissions. Often, when selling event admissions, it is desirable for the registrant to be able to fill out a profile during the checkout process that can be posted on the site once the transaction is complete. The UC Node Checkout module was built for this purpose. This is the way last year's Do It With Drupal conference handled registrations - with these exact modules. Setting it up can be a little tricky, as it is not entirely a straight-forward process. Ryan Szrama, the de-facto leader of the Ubercart project, demoed this module during the recent DrupalCon DC . I thought I'd take the time to reproduce what Ryan did, as it is a great introduction to this module. Keep in mind it won't be an exact reproduction, but it should be pretty close. This article will assume you're familiar with some very basic Ubercart concepts, if you're not, don't worry, this isn't rocket science. One thing you'll need to do if you're playing along at home is to create the "keys" directory for test credit card payments - full info on this is located at admin/store/settings/payment/edit/methods in your Drupal install (assuming you already have Ubercart enabled).

The Flag module is one of those modules that in its previous incarnation (as the Views Bookmarks module ) was a bit inflexible and often (at least in my cases) required some manual tweaking of the code to get it to do exactly what I wanted (no offense to the original authors, I actually used it a surprising number of times). The updated and renamed module is a breath of fresh air - it is an ease to install and configure for any number of use cases - in this article, I'll demonstrate how you can set up a list of the best comments on your site. The Flag module is extremely useful mainly due to its excellent integration with other Drupal modules - specifically Views and Actions (part of Drupal 6 core). It's also chock-full of AJAX-y goodness (flagging items doesn't require a full page refresh) and a plethora of configuration options.

After a decompression-Sunday with some friends in the DC area, I made my way back to sunny Florida today ready to start taking advantage of some of my new-found Drupal knowledge. Once I dug out of my piled-up mail and dirty laundry, I decided to summarize the rest of the 'Con. So, here goes...

I've been at the business-end of the DrupalCon firehose for 3 full days now, so I thought it would be a good time to share some of the cool stuff I've learned. As you've no doubt heard by now, this DrupalCon is over 50% larger than last year's event - with 1400 people and 6-tracks of sessions. It's been a chore not to get overwhelmed with all the options. Here's a quick summary of some of the sessions I attended:

Dave A Ingram also brought the youngest Drupaller - just 3 weeks old! He is dave.ingram on drupal.org, and he comes from Gainesville, FL

In the most recent DrupalEasy Podcast we talked about a few sessions we're looking forward to at DrupalCon DC . Here are my picks and a few reasons why I'm interested.

We'll be live blogging Dries Buytaert's "State of Drupal" keynote at the 2009 DrupalCon in Washington, DC. If you're not able to be in DC, you'll want to check out our live coverage on Wednesday, March 4 at 10:15AM ET. Check out our live coverage !

As part of our second podcast (which may or may not have been posted yet), Ryan, Andrew, and I discussed which of the DrupalCon DC sessions each of us were most looking forward to. In the interest of time (and retaining listeners), we each only talked about a couple. Here's my full top 5: 1. Advanced Ubercart Usage - Friday, 3PM - Ryan Szrama - I've built a few Ubercart-based sites in the past, but they've always been very simple implementations. I'm really looking forward to seeing what else this module is capable of. 2. Drupal and the Geospatial Web - Wednesday, 1:45PM - Jeff Miccolis - Location-based services always perk my interest. I've been using the GMap module for quite some time, but it doesn't always fit my needs. The folks at Development Seed have done some really neat work in this area and I'm looking forward to learning more. 3. Why I Hate Drupal - Friday, 9AM - James Walker - I've never seen a James Walker session I didn't like. I'm looking forward to hearing what parts of Drupal he'd like to see improved. 4. The Next Decade - Friday, 4:45PM - Karoly Negyesi and David Strauss - chx , 'nuff said. One of Drupal's biggest brains, I'm looking forward to once again realizing how little I actually know. 5. Building a Frankenstein monster & how to maintain it - Thursday, 1:45PM - Morton (King of Parties) - Everyone who's built more than a couple of Drupal sites has seen a theme grow out-of-control. Any tips I can pick up to prevent it from happening in the future is worth an hour of my time. I'm disappointed that there are no sessions involving the Rules or Workflow modules. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a BoF session or two...

Ryan, Mike, and Andrew from DrupalEasy will all be at DrupalCon DC next week. We'll be blogging, posting videos, and doing a podcast from the epi-center of the Drupal universe. Bookmark DrupalEasy.com/drupalcon or follow us at twitter.com/drupaleasy to stay up-to-date on everything that's happening!

This article is also available in French . Displaying hierarchical content is a common request of database-driven web sites. Drupal gives you great flexibility in doing this without writing a single line of code, using a couple of battle-tested modules. As an example, let's say you're building an automotive web site. Your site is going to have a list of automotive brands and the vehicles they build. You'd like to only have to enter each brand's information into the database once, then simply refer to that brand whenever you add one of their vehicles to the site. In this example, I have 2 brands, Chevy and Jeep, and each brand has 3 vehicles. Drupal's powerful CCK module allows you to define different content types for your web site. The Node Reference module, included with the rest of CCK, allows you to set up hierarchical relationships between content types.