VirtueMart is a project
VirtueMart is a project. Everyone is invited to be part of the project. The goal of the project is to provide the best free ecommerce solution, which is competitive to all other ecommerce solutions. The real goal behind this is to create a better world. We egalize possibilities. This does not not mean that we can help everyone for free. We provide the base environment everyone for free, what you can do with it depends only on you.
Being part of the project
Often we are asked how to join the project. It is more like a scene than a club. When you wanna join, just read, join the conversation, talk with us in the forum. Provide snippets, help other people, ask constructive questions. Being part of the virtuemart community is not possesing any membership like joining the local dog club. Joining the virtuemart community means to join us, the people behind it. Sometimes we read that the virtuemart project is not transparent, we use no roadmap, no tracker. Yes on the first view this right, on the second view the reason behind all this is that we try to minimize the waterhead coming due organisation of such an amount of people. Isnt that more a reason for a tracker or a roadmap? In fact we have a kind of tracker, and we have a roadmap. The idea behind of it is a system using priorities. We noticed that the priorities are changing faster than you can write them down. People being part of the community know the tracker (our forum) and they know where to find our roadmaps (forum, news).
When you want to join the team and to be listed on dev.virtuemart.net, then the work in the forum is almost for everyone a duty. People helping in the forum are usually invited by us directly. If you feel ignored, write a private message to Milbo (Max Milbers).
The forums
Most threads are been answered by moderators or passionate users, but sometimes it happens that some threads got completely ignored. We 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.
Over the past 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%.