Greetings to everyone,

We know that it seems from outside that virtuemart didn't evolve much during the last months and that development slowed down. But we had a lot of changes in the virtuemart team in the last months. It is like the first generation relays virtuemart to the second.

The founder and former leader of virtuemart Sören is from now on administrating the sites and provides the platform we used to develop VirtueMart. Sören didn't have the time lately to steer the project. So we decided to take 3 leaders - one of them will be around almost everytime. The ship is now steered by Rick (bass_28), Max (milbo), and Roland (rolandd).

Rick Glunt is an IT Manager for a US manufacturing company. He also runs a small IT consulting business. He has been programming on various platforms and with various languages for about 25 years.

Max Milbers is an engineer for constructions and wrote java programs for the car industry. He did a study for the Fraunhofer institute to show the possibilites of GPGPU. He is programming in various languages since 5 years.

You should also know Roland from the early VirtueMart days: he is the mastermind of CSVImproved.

Virtuemart was a standalone market before Sören made it as a component for joomla, so it is not written in the usual joomla way. This makes it unattractive for many developers.

Despite the former idea to write a complete new market, we decided to rewrite the vm1.2 code. The new philosophy is to rewrite vm1.2 step by step to MVC and to use the native joomla methods as best as possible.

We call that version vm1.5. At the moment we rewrite already the backend views. By that way we get rid off old bugs and clean the code. There are already a lot of new features in vm1.2 so we dont want to add features. First priority is to get a sophisticated smooth running code in joomla MVC style.

Everyone is welcome to help us. The more people help us the more views will be done in the first release. We dont need people who tell us what would be a cool feature and what the new version should contain. Write your ideas in the forum you can be sure it will be discussed.

We need people who want to actually do something. If you want to write some feature that cant be written as module, you can do it so long you do not disturb others in developing and the release cycles. But you should rewrite a small view first.

If you dont want to code, but help us, you can write documentation or test the newest virtuemart. As docwriter/tester you have a great influence to get features that are comfortable to use.

The vision is to have a market that is opensource, using joomla, flexible, easy to use and fast.

 So long Max