Directions, Directions
It’s been a great last few weeks here with lots of planning for the future taking place. I appreciate everyone who replied to my thread and/or emailed me about the key infrastructure changes will be taking place soon. It is only due to your valuable feedback that we can help ensure that we continue to grow in the right direction.
Direction and focus are two very important necessities when it comes to accomplishing anything. They help drive goals and they help instill purpose. In many of my exchanges with community members, many have shown great enthusiasm and tremendous desire to help shape future editions of Magento Community Edition. To be honest, I am bit humbled by the colossal appetite that community members continue to inspire me with and to that end I would like to announce the opening of our feature roadmap.
Roadmap. By The Community, For the Community
Currently the roadmap is mainly developed by us with input from the community while taking broad overall goals in consideration. While we work hard to make everyone happy we do ultimately need to achieve a balance which will help Magento advance all around. As the project gets healthier and more intricate, we find that the scope is ever increasing and would like to open up the roadmap to ensure that everyone continues to have equal opportunity to define the future flow. To enable that, we will be transferring the development of the roadmap to the Community Advisory Board. Through their direct involvement with the community the CAB will be able manage and supervise the roadmap more efficiently, more openly and more cordially.
The Community Advisory Board will be meeting some time within the next two weeks to discuss this and issues related to infrastructure changes. We are currently trying to sync schedules for the meeting and some members are on holiday and we will have more information when we set a date and time. We are always working to open doors for the community and give the community a greater ability to influence the path which Magento travels as it continues to flourish into the world’s greatest, most comprehensive and coolest eCommerce platform.
Until then please feel free to email myself, at oz@varien.com or any of the other CAB Members with questions and/or comments. The future is looking brighter and brighter and my guess its not only because the summer is rolling in!
Koby 
1Blue Acorn from Charleston, SC|posted June 30 2009
That’s great news Koby. Do you have plans to implement a voting mechanism such as uservoice or similar?
2Koby Oz |posted June 30 2009
@Blue Acorn
We will make that decision as part of the CAB meeting. Since it is up to CAB to manage the roadmap and its development, its a decision that would be best made by everyone. We are working on changing many process as well and we definitely look forward to integrating that type of functionality in places where it could help.
Koby:)
3john-michael |posted July 1 2009
The Community Advisory Board was announced March 26, 2009; it is now July. Since the day the CAB was announced there have been several blog posts regarding CAB meetings, suggestions of integral changes, as well as the formation of more groups to tackle issues revealed by the CAB. After three months, I was curious about the progress.
The formation of the CAB was obviously a reaction to the community’s displeasure related to a multitude of subjects I would assume the CAB was created to manage. I can’t imagine you feel blog posts full of promises would be the solution. Because from the publics point of view, that’s exactly what the CAB has done.
I’m looking forward to seeing real progress from the CAB. You have a lot of community members with a lot of excellent ideas. Hopefully you actually take action.
4Koby Oz |posted July 1 2009
@john-michael
Thank you for your interest and for sticking with us! Progress is being made and much like any project, and life itself, will hit a growth spurt at certain times and valleys in others. Things are moving faster and faster and if we have been slow on some stuff, please bear with us. The infrastructure changes we have spoken about are on their way, it has taken a great amount of effort to put these plans into something tangible and it all takes time, effort and most importantly resources (i.e. money!). We are trying to fundamentally shift the way things are done, and once that is in place, many things will become much easier.
I am glad you are vocal about it and glad that you care.
Thanks,
Koby
5lisali from London, UK|posted July 1 2009
Hi,
That’s good news. However, it is very, very sad that Mageno has so far completely ignored interacting wiith the community - there are no team members in the forum any more. Bug reports are ignored and not commented on or just closed without any explanation. I would really like to see Magento work with the community. I hope this marks the start of a new chapter in how Magento and Varien are talking to us.
6Andi28 |posted July 10 2009
@lisali: I am with you in that matter!
7ladle |posted July 16 2009
How soon can we expect the roadmap back up.
8Koby Oz |posted July 16 2009
Hello,
We will be discussing the transition of the Roadmap at today’s CAB meeting and we will figure out some sort of plan, based on the direction of the roadmap, as to when we will publicize the roadmap.
Please stay tuned. It seems as though we have fixed our issues with recording the meetings, so we should be able to have at least a summary of the discussions soon.
9Andi28 |posted July 17 2009
@Koby Oz: Thanks for your feedback! Hopefully Varien won’t forget the community in the course of starting the enterprise edition.
10dieter333 |posted August 13 2009
Hi there, it would be really great if you could give us some information if a subscription (productsubscription) is coming up in the near future or not!? We are still trying to use magento as a classified system as well and this feature would be very helpfull…
11kdeelstra |posted September 8 2009
Please also discuss proper EU VAT number validation and EU VAT calculation rules. These are mixed together in the forum discussions I read here and there. Its not clear if in current alpha 1.4 release either the validation or the calculation is implemented.
I think this should be first thing to do on the roadmap: its a must have for international B-B EU shops otherwise they cannot funciton
12ladle |posted September 8 2009
kdeelstra.
This project shows as being completed in 1.4 on the community roadmap. http://magento.uservoice.com/pages/24441-magento-community-edition-roadmap/filter/hot
see completed tab.
13Olof |posted October 10 2009
1.4 does not support popper EU B2B Tax rules.
It needs to address the validation of VAT numbers and removal of VAT for intra country transactions?
http://magento.uservoice.com/pages/24441-magento-community-edition-roadmap/suggestions/278171-proper-eu-vat-support?ref=title
14bp8729 |posted October 11 2009
(This is directed mainly at Varien as a company, and I’m assuming that the leaders of this community effort have strong ties to the parent company and thus this would be of interest).
Suggestion: Magento would benefit enormously from having some normal community-oriented tools. The forum is of course a good step in the right direction - but also an issue tracker, including a way to submit patches. I also didn’t see an SVN or CVS tree. And how about way to contribute documentation? (Sorry, folks - no matter how many times you say that your XML format is simple and easy to learn - do some Google searches: many, many people loath that format - and one of the chief reasons is that it is poorly documented - no tag reference that I could find, only a few examples, and explanations about “Content Blocks” and “Structural Blocks” - with a) no “cookbook” for average Joe who just wants to do X, and no decent actual developer docs for the people who actually know how to code and want to understand what is happening.)
So even though Magento is “open source” it is really rather closed for contribution from the community. By providing tools for people to develop and collaborate regarding Magento, you will create a community that consists more of people that want to contribute to Magento, and not just “mooch” off of it.
Likely one of the problems you face is how many people you have to have to answer questions on the forum and the costs thereof. The reason is that this is the wrong approach - the community will answer it’s own questions: BUT, only if you give them the tools figure the answers out! Do an actual analysis of how a community like Drupal’s is put together - the number of contributions is enormous. Unless you decide to actually encourage and support a community and take action, Varien will forever be stuck in the rut of trying to earn a profit by making something that is free in name, but not in actuality because people can’t do everything they need to do with it, can’t get their questions answered, and can’t contribute back.
So my recommendation would be basically to fire up Mantis or something of that sort and have a publicly accessible Subversion repository, and a wiki where documentation can be put together (even if people have to request specifically for access to edit the wiki - it would be a major improvement). I think you’ll find that the infrastructure for implementing things in this fashion has much less of an impact on Varien than trying to staff people to answer forum questions - and much more rewarding.
15john-michael |posted October 11 2009
@bp8729,
When an open source project sells a VERY basic “how to” on it’s GUI, I think you can make some basic assumptions about the “openness” of the project. The types of things you’re suggesting, community contributions, more available developer documentation, and additional tools of the like are pipe dreams IMO.
Developing for magento is not a sit down and digest the documentation type of task, and I believe Varien likes to keep it that way. Moreover, the freelance developers that take the time to figure out magento on their own like the development exclusivity as well. Helps pay the bills, if you will.
I don’t personally know the man, but from what I’ve seen in interview, Roy seems to be quite the micro manager. I can’t imagine someone who takes as much time “grooming” the authors of just the magento blog would willingly agree to community code contributions. Additionally, opening up the code to the community would severely shorten the gap between the community addition and the Enterprise Edition, with respect to features. The argument could be made that scenario is possible now with modules, but with my above points regarding development documentation, we all know that’s not the truth.
All in all, the community is bound by both the direct and indirect constraints of Varien’s business model. And if it wasn’t for Varien, we wouldn’t have Magento, so for that fact alone, we must respect Varien’s business model, however anti-community it may be.
16bp8729 |posted October 11 2009
john-michael,
Yup - I do definitely know where you are coming from. I guess we’ll have to see how it plays out.
I’m sure that right now their business model depends on people not being able to figure out how to really do what they need to do with Magento by themselves (at least not easily). The trouble is - as has been the history of so many other projects - that this is likely to eventually have major problems. Either a) someone will eventually come along with a better open source solution that actually does utilize community contribution and Varien will suddenly find themselves feeling like their competitors - undercut and unable to show users why they should bother paying for their product, or b) someone will fork the Magento code base and do the same thing (although this is not so likely - as it’s configuration complexity would likely take a lot of doing to rework and make actual simple and useful - mind as well do some work on Ubercart instead...).
It would be nice if they wouldn’t keep trying to claim that it’s configuration is “easy” and “fun” and “simple”. It just rubs one the wrong way - because it’s not, unless one is doing the simplest of changes.
In any case - thanks for the reply. I guess Varien will have to decide how they want to play their cards.
17jshpro2 from Florida|posted October 12 2009
I bet we see a branch in the near future
18Koby Oz |posted October 12 2009
@everyone
If you have been keeping up with what’s going on we have finalized the contributor agreement and it is going to be announced tomorrow morning, along with the accepting of contributed code. We are also working on a dashboard for the site that will give people status updates related to their bugs and other contributions.
I look forward to making the announcement tomorrow!
Good times ahead…
19bp8729 |posted October 12 2009
@Koby Oz,
Thanks for the reply - yes, this is very cool. I assume the idea is to have an issue tracker where people can submit bug reports and also patches and the like - definitely needed.
Any ideas/plans for community documentation (wiki) ?....
20eitai2001 from Johannesburg, South Africa|posted October 29 2009
Hi. Any news on the announcement ... where can I find it?
21jshpro2 from Florida|posted November 8 2009
Yeah any updates? What kind of of contributions will be accepted? Will you only allow new modules to be appended to the code base? We will be allowed to patch existing code? Refactor view scripts?
What proposing changes like not using alternate syntax, will there be a voting system?
22Garrone from Lauria - Italy|posted November 20 2009
Any update after a month? Let us know.
23Koby Oz |posted December 8 2009
@jshpro2, do you have any code you would like to contribute to Magento?
24Koby Oz |posted December 8 2009
@Garrone, sure we have updates! The next CAB meeting is on December 17th and we will be discussing the Community Edition Roadmap and the start of some changes to the wiki led by the community. We also have our google group for those wishing to sign the MCA and contribute code to the community!
25Koby Oz |posted December 8 2009
@jshpro2, as announced in the blog post here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/tomorrow-today/, if you have code you would like to submit for review, please fill out and return the Magento Contributor Agreement, found here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/uploads/MCA-Magento-Contributor-Agreement-230909.pdf and then join the Magento Development Google Group found here: http://groups.google.com/group/magento-devel and submit your code in patch format and people on the list will give you feedback. There are Magento engineers on this list at well.
We have been accepting code patches officially through the MCA process since at least September. I really look forward to seeing you on the google group and list as an active and contributor!! I’m glad you have code you want us to look at!