Happy Birthday VirtueMart 2

Our gift is 2.0.16

Hello people. Almost exactly one year ago we released VirtueMart 2.0.0. if you take a close look the news from the 19.12.11 - 23:52, with the final uploaded on 20.12.11, this was just 12 months ago.

VirtueMart 2 had a quite rough start, taking a look back we released maybe too early, however this was due to many users pushing us to release. Vm2.1 is already in the pipe and will be ready for testing mid-January, so this is the last of the VirtueMart 2.0.x series.

The newest Virtuemart 2

com_virtuemart.2.0.16_extract_first.targz.zip
or
com_virtuemart.2.0.16_extract_first.zip

The past 12 months:

We had to solve a lot of different problems last year and not only in the code, we wanted to revive a language based virtuemart 2 community, so worked continually in the background to achieve this, we travelled to conferences and gave free workshops, showing many people how easy VM2 is to use, whilst preparing the re launch of the virtuemart.net website, created a new template and layout, added a new board in the forum for 3rd party developers. We are now almost ready to port all extensions from oldextensions.virtuemart.net to extensions.virtuemart.net and have started to invite more and more of the many extension developers, but we want to ensure we also review all components, and this takes time, so all in all it has been a pretty busy year.

The forums:

In the past few days, I trawled through the forums and was surprised to see most threads have been answered by moderators or passionate users, but that some threads got completely ignored. I have thought about how this happens and have asked our moderators to find ways to prevent it. We feel the reasons are quite simple, the core developers (Valerie and Max) should not spend their time checking the forum, because we need this time to develop the core, of course we take a look every 1-2 days, but some days a thread is pushed on the second page within hours, because of the volume of active people.

The core developers and supporters are mostly Europeans and so it can be very likely that we just don’t see them as often as users need, however many of the answers have been supplied by the community.

VirtueMart the project:

VirtueMart is a project, and over the past few weeks an amazing number of patches have been created by the community (GREAT WORK thank you), so if there is a thread in the forum that’s regularly updated, moderators just assume that people find a solution themselves, whilst other moderators think that code snippets are professional talk. Another misconception and one of the biggest problems, is that people often claim they have bugs, when this is merely a product of misconfiguration, and on the other side of the coin, we think it is just a misconfiguration, when in fact it is a bug or missing feature. This is a confusion we are trying to address. But in majority the community has helped us to create the great product VirtueMart 2, which has evolved into and one we are proud to use.

So in conclusion:

So in conclusion, many people have helped, the speed of growth with development and patches has been astounding, with slight cracks appearing in the way people perceive the forum, a perception that we ignore posts, or avoid answering, but this is not a case of ignoring anyone, or any thread, if there is a live thread and the team seems to ignore it, remind yourself, the team never ignores something on purpose, just write a short pm (without swearing if possible) to me. We believe Vm2 is more flexible and mightier than vm1, so most people can get a shop working using only 30% of the features and everyone uses different 30%.

Small insight into the future:

We wanted to release vm2.1 now, which offers a new structured customfields, which has resulted is massive speed gains by the rewritten customfields, and should include multiple prices, editable orders, more userfields, variation of fonts for pdf’s, and a whole lot more. The multiple price features was almost done already for 2.0.14, so we decided to release a fast 2.0.16 for the people who require multiprice.

Before any release we check the forum, and discovered a lot (20+) of patches and good bug reports, many thanks for these, and they are now all integrated into vm2.0.16, additionally, we have added a lot of speed optimisations.

We hope you enjoy 2.0.16 a product the community helped craft by ironing out bugs and fixes and we have already started on many features and ideas for the next series.

List of bug fixes and features in the forum Topic: Updated: Release 2.0.16 Final