Complementary currencies for Drupal

This software project is for communities trading in complementary currencies such as LETS and Time banks.

Who needs marketplace for Drupal?

Every LETS community, and other communities using exchanging value amongst themselves. This software was designed to support pure LETS, but has some flexibility built in, and other kinds of tweaks are possible.

Why is Marketplace for Drupal is important

There are several software solutions out there, which I have sketched in a recent blog post, but none of them is in a position to become a large scale solution to the needs of thousands of communities. In contrast to the others, Marketplace for Drupal is:

• free and open source
• designed for existing trading communities
• a plug-in to a much larger, well supported system (Drupal).

For a friendly introduction to Drupal and why it is generally a good idea, read this free first chapter of Hello Drupal.

What kinds of systems does marketplace for Drupal not support

There is a wide variety of complementary currency systems around

Communities printing their own paper money might derive little benefit from Marketplace, where every trader has an account, and each transaction is recorded. However Marketplace might work very well for a mixed cash / banking system, where currency can checked in and out of the 'cash' account and distributed as notes.

Communities who are already working with local banks will not be too impressed with this system. However banks tend to take away autonomy from users and if that was a problem, Marketplace might be appropriate.

What happens on this site

Now you can log in as one of the dummy users on the left, and experience Marketplace for Drupal as an end user. Then you can contact me and ask how you can experience it as a system administrator, or you can download the module and install it into Drupal yourself.

When evaluating this web site, remember that a lot of features you need are available as other Drupal modules. This site showcases the marketplace module, working in a default drupal installation.

A real community would enable many other Drupal features and overlay a new graphic design and layout. It would probably contain more information about members using the profile module or node_profile. It would probably have user generated content, RSS feeds, the weather, the local radio station - anything. Marketplace for Drupal supports only the trading aspect of community life. Other free modules support all the other aspects.

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