Yes, any ideas on the next release? We’re really interested in using Magento for Virtual products but this is not currently supported. This would be a great thing to have!
The next release is expected within 60-90 days or so. We do not publish firm dates.
Thanks for that info. I appreciate your willingness to give approximate dates, even though they are not firm.
Here’s my perspective on which features from your roadmap are most important, in order
Backorders, IF this can handle pre-orders as well. (See my post about pre-orders for further details)
Virtual products with support for downloadable products
Bundles (if by this you mean a group of items that cost less when you buy them together)
Web Services API
Are all of these *likely* to make it into the next version in 60-90 days?
In my opinion the most important features is: EU tax and Orders export (csv, xml)
The first will open Magento to a very big market and the with the second we will be able to “connect” Magento with an ERP.
I would say the #1 priority at the moment should be on performance improvements. To have Magento running at a reasonable speed (no, this is not only a hardware issue) is in my opinion way more important than adding new features. There is no reason why it should take ~10 seconds or more to load the page for the first time with only the demo catalog loaded.
I only hope the team behind Magento recognizes this, because in all other ways the software is second to none compared to other e-commerce products.
I’m not too bent out of shape over actual release dates, but I was curiious if we could get some insight into the road map. Would it be possible to sort (and resort when things change) the road map by likelyhood to be in the next release. Could we get a little star next to items that are actually in process as opposed to planned but no resources allocated?
I must admit that some of the items on the road map sound very juicy. Any chance we could get a tiny bit more info on plans for new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, etc. when they are put on the road map? I mean Bundles is intriguing but it took me awhile to figure out what they are (even now my idea of what they are and what they will be may differ from what you folks have in mind). A little summary of the intent of a feature would be nice. On the other hand it might just cause all of us anxiously awaiting that feature to be just a little more anxious.
All in all you guys are doing a great job. I’ve done commercial software development. Your turn times are great. Just be careful not to burn out those people who are making the magic happen. That being said…
I’m looking forward to getting a peak at those new features.
I must also agree on the speed issue. It doesn’t matter how many features the software has, if you can’t use them because it is too slow. We are planning on launching a pretty big website (over 20,000 products - including more than 1000 configurable products with 17,000 different configurations) using Magento in a few weeks. We have it running on a very nice dedicated server and have made most of the improvements suggested in the blog (except for tmpfs, which we are working on now). However it still runs very slow and I am worried about paying adwords dollars for hits and then customers leaving because the site is too slow.
However—I must also give a big thank you to the Magento team—it would not be right for me to only criticize. We are obviously sticking with Magento for a reason. I have confidence in the Magento team. You guys have done a great job and after the performance tweaks are finished, I would say your software will be a grade A e-commerce platform.
My vote is also for performance
The rest can come later
My vote is that the number 1 priority should be bundles, the number 2 should be downloadable content, and then the number 3 should be performance
PS: the number 4 would be fixing dataflow
I mean the next after 1.0.1970… In a month, two? 
