Some people were annoyed that we do not update about the situation. The question is do we communicate or do we develop? Our style to develop needs already really a lot of communication, because we use rapid prototyping and pair programming technics. There is also a lot of communication in the forum. People who follow the vm2 forum a bit are updated. They can see the errors, questions and our answers.
They should also consider that we already released a version which is more or less treated by the development team as a final. That means we take care that people can smoothly update. For us it is important that beta testers can use their work for their final store. We also train the update processes itself. As I already wrote before I suggest to install vm2, try, test and learn it. Start to create your store, learn the possibilities. Then you can decide if VM2 is ready for your purposes. The virtuemart 2 core is now and later released as is without warranty. If it is a final or not.

There are also some people who are annoyed, because they trusted the published ETA and have now angry clients. This people are very rude. Not helping but shouting that it is too slow is just ... (speechless). It is really crazy that the team should feel guilty and is accused for something it never promised by people who did nothing for the virtuemart project .

The version M was quite final, so we tested to develop different plugins and run into trouble. The payment and shipment plugins do not belong to the core, but are essential for a shop, so releasing a core without a minimum amount of working plugins is useless. We noticed that the system can be simplified, which improves and helps with the plgugin development. Since we are not final, we combined the abstract plugin handler for shipment and payment plugins. Within 3 days we optimised the pluginsystem and enhanced it. This was a big shift and very good that we waited with the final release.
The next big shift is that we got unhappy with the multilanguages solution for j1.7, or better said, there is none and it will take time until there is any and the solutions in seight are not performant. We got the idea how to write a fast performant multilanguage system. Since we need that for the virtuemart store, we decided to write it and it seems that we needed 4 days for it. The result is a multilanguage system, which is even faster than before.
Since we changed 2 big systems, the plugin system and the language system, we must do another release. We call it Release Candidate 3.

Feature list: Integrated in joomla 1.5 and joomla 1.7 with its advantages (articles, blog, forum, ...)

• Uses joomla extensions
• User based shopsystem
• Template overrides (layouts, mails)

 

native multilanguage

• categories
• products
• manufactuers
• vendors
• seo

 

nested categories

• with meta tags for seo
• with description and media

 

shoppergroups

• pricing depending by shoppergroups
• price display depending by shoppergroups
• payment/shipment depending by shoppergroups
• anonymous shoppergroup

 

shopper

• customizable shopper input form
• input form depended on registration, checkout or shipment
• completly anonymous checkout
• Adressbook
• default Bill-to and Ship-to address
• default payment and shipment method
• check of eu vat id (not working yet)

 

products

• with meta tags for seo
• short and long description
• dimensions (weight, size)
• multiple media
• variants, attributes
• stockable variants
• unlimited child products and derivated levels
• product pattern (Parent product used as pattern for child products)
• related products

 

Inventory/Stocking

• stocking/inventory
• stock warning
• virtual stock (ordered but not finally bought)

 

Prices

• various type of prices to display depended by shoppergroup
• prices adjusted by shopper choosen currency
• different currency format per currency

 

real multi currency

• auto updating rates
• add your own currencies for fixed currency rates

 

manufacturer media handler

• atm finished for images, will be used for downloadables, videos, pdf, programs, ...

default SEF/SEO integrated Product reviews and ratings dynamical calculator

• discounts based on time, category, shoppergroup, country, and state
• tax based on time, category, shoppergroup, country, and state
• discounts, tax per product and/or order
• discounts, tax have their own currencies (for duties)

 

multiple payment and shippings options

• shipment payment methods are defined per vendor

 

checkout

• guest checkout; completly anonymous checkout
• option to register at begin of checkout
• cart is an object, competly overridable by template
• cart is stored in the session
• 1 click checkout
• multipage checkout
• one page checkout (not by default)
• SSL

 

order handling backend

• Payment/shipment workflow
• history
• modifiable

 

order handling frontend

• order tracking for anonymous users

 

revenue

• sortable

 

template handling

• different joomla templates by category
• different category browse pages per category
• different product display pages per category/product

 

product display configurable by

• latest
• topten (most sold)
• newest
• featured
• sortable
• searchable

 

marketing promotions and tools

• coupon handling
• recommend a product to friend link

 

other

• hidden debugging tool