Because this has been taken to the public by Max Milbers (the so called "Virtuemart Team Leader"), i was urged to reply to this also in public. If you are a VMX subscriber, please accept the last paragraph of the statement as my offer to you!
VMX Statement
we have taken the VMX Version offline for some reasons.
One reason is, that there where major technical problems with Virtuemart 1.1.5 – mostly in regards to the Joomla 1.6 compatibility. These technical problems are solved and VMX is working on several sites.
There are other reasons that have kept us from publishing the product and the download again. Until now, i tried not to discuss this in the public, but there are things going on, that need a statement from us.
The so called „Team“ - which i am obviously still a member of – is not lucky with the VMX-Version. There is a lot of discussion, public abuse and threats, that comes from some „team“ members. Just for your information: this is not the team that made Virtuemart that is used for thousands of shops today!
Though we clearly stated that we are releasing this subscription based version with the goal to improve Virtuemart and to support the free version, some „team“ members still accuse us to „misuse their names“, „make money from their work“ and so on (there were uglier statements...).
Once again our initial goals:
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the earnings from the subscriptions will be rewarded to Virtuemart development.
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We are trying to move the 1.1.x version forward
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The 1.1.x version will be Joomla 1.6 compatible with VMX
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the release of VMX should take the pressure from Virtuemart 1.5 development
I was asked, why we not just contribute the features to the official Virtuemart version. Also this was clearly stated in the VMX-announcement. I have tried to add features to the 1.1.x version as a development team member! But the „team leader“ pointed out very harsh and clearly, that this is not wanted, because the version 1.5 is in development and 1.1.x shall not receive any new features. BTW: this was exactly one year ago! Another point was, that Virtuemart 1.1.x should be Joomla 1.0 compatible – which is a problem, when you want to add Joomla 1.6 compatibility, which seems more important to me.
You can believe me that i am truly sorry about how this turned out to be. I never would have expected this when i agreed to release the VMX-Version.
But what has changed since more than a year? No new features in Virtuemart 1.1.x, Virtuemart 1.5 far away from beta status and other (commercial!) ecommerce extensions are coming up.
If there is one good thing from the VMX-discussion, than it is that the J1.0 compatibility is dropped with the upcoming Virtuemart 1.1.6.
We will try to find a way how to release the VMX features in a very short time with the best result for the user in mind. If you don't want to wait for that, i offer a full refund of what you might have payed – just let me know!
[Update: since today i am not an official Virtuemart Team Member anymore ;-) More about this soon...]
