It is going to fast...

The versions of NC follow each other so fast including the swith from vs2008 nc160 to vs2010 nc170 and now 180 already. Instead of fixing bugs first to get a stable release and expand later with new functions. NC is steaming ahead with new features and leave long outstanding bugs for what they are. Not to mention new bugs with the added new 'stuff'.

Although the extensions of features are nice. The "basic need" for a shop owner is to sell stuff as fast and easy without errors. simplified: Client fills shopping cart > pays > ship  stuff to them > done. Next client...

All other enhancements are basically not necessarily needed for a shop to run. Unless  a shop owner has all the time in the world to keep them selfs busy with forum messages, customer products preview reviewing/editing and other stuff then selling items.

Also for the open source community to keep up with the release tempo of NC is terrible. If you're  finally ready to release some better handling of [fill in your custom code/control code here] NC steps up to vs2010 and shakes up the whole existing code base. And we as community developers just got to the steps that we finally starting to understand the code base of NC. We do not even have time to test a release to full extend and NC is coming with the next version already!

It is great that NC is releasing version after version, it is really appreciated, but please slow down a little so the community has some time to 'work' with it and give some descent feedback and bug reports. Not to mention the time the community spent in merging custom work into every new release.


I guess the topic title should be changes to : "Is it going to fast?"

Thanks for suggestion. Here are my thoughts. Currently there're not so much features and tasks left that we're planning to implement. You can see all of them here, just filter status by 'Active' and Release by 'nopCommerce 1.90' and 'nopCommerce 2.00' (about 15 major features). ETA for nopCommerce 1.90 is December 2010. ETA for nopCommerce 2.00 is February 2011. After all them are implemented nopCommerce will have almost everything that a solid e-commerce software should have, and we'll not be releasing new versions so often. After that we'll start working on a marketplace for developers

What is the best step to do then?

- Wait until February to implement custom code and or options
- Customize now and reinsert custom code  with every update until 2.0
- Use NC160 as a base stable platform until version 2.0 and then implement custom code again.

I had high hopes for a 1.x 'final' and then continue from 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 etc until 2.x 'final' version. If you understand what I mean. Since there is no 'final' part in the NC update path its hard to know which version is a good stable base for community developers to work on. Basically for us it is the fear of continually have to rebuild and implement custom code with every new version.

I am pretty much have the same thought. I have quite alot of custom code and updating so fast is not an option for me. I am staying with NC 1.6 until it more stablize or unless i really need a feature of a new NC version.

USRFobiwan wrote:

I cannot believe ANYONE would complain about rapid production releases! Why don't you whiners just go out and buy a 1-3k package without source code and be happy with maybe 1 every 6 month relesae dates!

First of all I do not complain and I am certainly not appreciate attack on personal level. If you read my post you should have noticed I'm happy with all the updates. however for business or community development it is hard to keep up without having a stable build to rely on. Lets for example take the 'discount and 'tax' bug that is is still not working since 1.x and still is not solved in the latest 1.80 release.

I suggested to work on solutions for all the outstanding bugs first, before implementing any new features. In other words;  Start from a stable build that can be used by anyone as a base platform, it will benefit all.

I apologize if I offended you and I fully understand and appreciate your points. However, every software package in the world has bugs in it. I for one, appreciate rapid product releases, the bugs I can deal with since the source code is available. From what I can gather, nopCommerce goes to great lengths to test the new versions through pre release beta testing. I, for one prefer rapid product releases...............

More reasons why to fix things first before adding more features:

Caching bug
SQL Query optimization and some more
Tax calculation bug
Image display optimizing

USRFobiwan wrote:

USRFobiwan,

I agree there are some bugs that should take priority over adding new features. The first two you list above are being actively worked on - mainly related to the switch to Entity Framework. The Tax issue is high priority. I do not personally see the png transparency as a major issue however.

Regarding your first post about the rate of nopCommerce releases: The .NET framework continues to advance at an astonishing rate. Part of nopCommerce's popularity is that it is taking advantage of these new improvements in the framework. Moving to the entity framework was an example of this, and although there has been some performance issues, it is still a great move for the project.

Switching to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 allowed us to use many of these features. I work on other open source .NET projects who also did the same. If you are a developer you shouldn't have any problem with this move.

It doesn't matter what changes in nopCommerce, if you are making your own custom changes, you will always have a mismatch. However, by keeping your extensions separate from the core libraries and well documented, this can reduce the pain of upgrading.

Also please keep your language clean in the forums - think of the children :)

Since you are now focusing more on the bugs I agree with you  except for the language part or did I made a typo somewhere by mistake?