Product catalog site (+ Store) - what strategy? I'm creating a site in Drupal 7 with a 200-item product catalog. Currently the products have only informative pages for which I created a custom content type and taxonomy, but at some point, when the site owner gets ready, I may have to launch a store.

Taking into account that the only store available for D7 is Drupal Commerce in its beta (is my research correct?), I was wondering what strategy you would choose:

a) install beta of DrupalCommerce only for product information pages, turn off the shopping cart, just to save yourselves work later (migrating the product pages content)

b) go on populating the custom content type pages and wait for the DrupalCommerce to go into stable release?

c) split the site into two domains - informative (www.example.com) and store (store.example.com). This solution scares me off a bit in that it'd require maintaining about twice as much content in parallel - this always smells of errors and problems... OTOH, I could employ a Drupal-independent solution, such as PrestaShop.

Has anyone used the DrupalCommerce beta? Does it cause much trouble at this point?

Looking forward to hearing your insights.

Artur
Drupal commerce is not your only bet for a shopping site for Drupal 7, but it is the best one.

At this time of writing commerce is on beta-4 but it wont be long before rc-1 will be released. It's very stable considering that it's a beta release, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Talking about personal experience I have launched one site on commerce, which was launched when commerce was still in alpha, most likely the first production on commerce. So I have a good firsthand experience with running commerce in a production environment. Other than the pain of having to do my own upgradings from alpha to beta, commerce has been running very stable without any major problems so far.

Taking into account the above. I would personally go with option a):


Install commerce
Create products
Create nodes with products reference to display the data
Don't display add to cart form anywhere.


You might need to use a bit of time to setup commerce and products types, but it would allow you to quickly and easily convert the catalog to an actual shop and that save you a lot of headaches later on.