Observation/Comments about commercial plugins

[Agaton]

Hi,

The reason for this post is to establish as to the direction of Virtuemart as an Open source project with commercial add-ons, as this is not the first time I find myself in the position of buying, and I will happily do so, commercial enhancements which either miss vital elements, do not carry sufficient tutorials or do not do what is stated in the advertising.

Virtuemart has always been free and as a result it is expected that support is unpredictable as with any free open source project, but when money changes hands for paid for plugins and modules then the contract and expectation changes.

Two examples....

I purchased all about products which is supposed to display a best seller list, unfortunately it removes shipped items from the list. A bug obviously, but the developer won't respond and there is no obvious place to report bugs.

Then I choose to buy a quantity calculation plugin built by the project leader, who has developed a wonderful plugin that does what the core 1.1.x used to do but better. However in 1.1.x it used to display in the flypage the multiple price breakdown, but this new plugin does not. Again I have made a few posts in this forum but with no response.

Virtuemart is one of the best products on the web for eCommerce, it's light in resource usage yet has many useful and well thought out functions and is one of the reasons I have used VM for over 6 years. A lack of response on forums for free open source projects is understandable, if frustrating. Paying for a commercial plugin and then getting ignored on forums is something else.

Would it not be better for the Virtuemart Team to create a new forum thread to cover commercial plugins, that get answered.

This thread is not a moan or is not here to encourage people to add there own grievances about time taken to answer forums, this is not what this is about. I am writing this as a business owner that has built his business around Virtuemart and Joomla concerned that the approach taken over commercial plugins does not take into consideration that the expectations are then higher and that support needs to be better when money is changing hands. My clients expect that of me why should my expectations be any different.

As I post this my current forum questions have been viewed and the developer in question has answered other posts since.