Today is our 5th birthday!
It's a big goal for the whole team to keep live and running , for such a long time , an open source software, but for sure it's an even more particular event for the VirtueMart project founder, Soeren, who drops us a few lines about what once was a mambo script and in a few months will become a stable Joomla! 1.5 MVC component.
The VirtueMart Developer Team is proud to announce the release of VirtueMart 1.1.5
Important: there will be differences between a clean installation and an upgrade from VirtueMart 1.1.4, please continue reading below!
VirtueMart has now its official twitter account, http://www.twitter.com/virtuemart
Follow us to have a direct contact with us and to stay updated with latest blog & news posting, release announcements, core developers tweets and the best selected retweets about #virtuemart from the twitterverse.
There’s something worth mentioning about VirtueMart ? just tweet us , we’ll review your theme, extension or module in our website!
So what are you waiting for ? Follow us on @virtuemart right now.
HeyHOoo,
The Redmine developer platform is working well now - thanks to Rochen Ltd. - and is being adapted by our developers. The process of "porting virtuemart to MVC" is in the last phase of development, the internal testing phase will start soon.
For handling all the different languages that may be used in VirtueMart we now have a Language Manager: Devendra Kumar Shukla. He is handling the files and can give some tips and tricks for translators.
We now have a new PR-manager and a kind of spokesperson: Gabriele Sabadini (k0nan). He will help us to be more transparent to the public.
The internal staff forum boards are now accessible for each Senior Member and higher.
For a long time we used a developers chat in Skype, but unfortunately Skype made larger group chats unmoderatable. Sometimes users came in and asked support questions, which was not intended. Therefore we see the need for an open a public channel for all users. We tried moving the developer chat to IRC to obtain better public chat controls than we have available in Skype, however, IRC was not well received. We now have set up our own jabber server on jabber.virtuemart.net.
The new jabber/XMPP adress for the common room is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
To get the synergetic benefits of "model-view-controller" (MVC) it is necessary that we port the Frontend of VirtueMart as well as its Backend. The structure for the Frontend is now nearly done. We hope to get a release candidate at the end of this month.
Maybe some people are wondering what has happened recently, seeing no real changes in the trackers and not a lot posts.
We have actually been very busy lately. After a long fight with the CodeBeamer development platform, and almost every new developer fighting with this system, we decided to switch to Redmine. We have tested it thoroughly in the last few weeks. Redmine works very well and we got used to it so quickly that we have only used the Redmine system for the last weeks.
With the switch to Redmine we needed to establish a new teamstructure. We recognize that we have a big pool of people, who want to support the project - but they often just joined the team and didn't actually have the time to work (but will do so later), some lost their available free time (new job) and some had an accident or big change in their life. All okay, and we hope that each team member who volunteered will provide active help later, when they are able. But it is hard for us to find the people in the first place. It is much easier to have a team in which everyone is actually participating. On the other hand, people need a way to communicate with the team and to see if they can actually participate.
The idea now is that we open the internal VirtueMart forums even more for experienced VM users and third party developers who request to join. The internal forums are not strictly team-internal anymore. They are meant as a communication platform of VirtueMart experts who want to exchange development ideas and discuss possibilities.
Redmine will be a VirtueMart developer only platform (of course with testers, writers and so on). We will choose the people for the team out of the forum. This makes joining and participating to the project a lot easier. The badge in the forum just indicates the abilities of a new member and we can see if someone fits to the team.
Everyone who wants to participate in the internal forums should register here, write a private message with your reasons to "Milbo" or "Jenkinhill" (forum nick names) to gain access to the internal forums.