Good point. I have personally developed a fully featured (minus payment & shipping provider) shopping cart forked off of the original IBuySpy Cart. The complete history is here on my site. I have offered to donate my time or my code to the project, and received a polite response that once the project was stable, he would be fine with possibly incorporating some of my stuff into the project. I have put many hours into this module for my customer, first by adding an Email Payment Gateway, then by changing that email payment gateway to provide the ability to capture checking account information and require the customer to agree to a strict TOS. I did not realize the administrative sections lacked any form of order fulfillment management and will have to eat many hours to incorporate this capability into the cart with no benefit to the community.

My reason for choosing the core version of the cart over my own was the fact that I found many solutions to problems I worked a great deal on and couldn't resolve, most notably implementing the provider model for payment gateways, shipping gateways, taxes, and whatever else. With such an elegant method of persisting provider specific settings, it should be a breeze to convert the many open source payment gateways to the store module's interface: the CommerceStarter kit's providers can easily be adapted for use by this store because it has implemented the provider model for all of the provider oriented features. In summary, I chose this module because it really has a very sophisticated design and it offers the best starting point for a simple cart.

As Dwayne B. put it earlier in this thread, development on the module reached many limits, etc, work best left to a single developer because of the many structural changes required. Which leaves us at his mercy until he decides to release his changes. This same thing happened to the dnnElearn project. dnnElearn was exceptional code, and had many great ideas in each version released by it's author. Unfortunately, although he made attempts to host the project on WDEVS.com and put the project into a project tracker, the source for the version he was working on never made it into the project's source vault, and so no one ever took the initiative to keep the project alive (From what I understand, Robert C. also has a similar module, but I don't know if it's free like dnnElearn was). What a shame because the dnnElearn showed so much promise and had a community of hundreds eagerly anticipating something...

That being said, the Store Module is a DotNetNuke CORE Module. Shouldn't the core team have some form of veto power over the module's developers when they fail to meet their commitments? In this case, we are talking about several months of no release with several 'elite' guys working on it, with sporadic bi-monthly updates.

I have another question: from what I read in Dwayne B.'s post, apparently the module's developers felt the need to 86 development in DotNet 1.1 in favor of 2.0 (a great decision) but the point is, this should have been the ONLY task for a new release. From what I gathered from Dwayne's post, they had many other design decisions to make in addition to the upgrade of the module from .NET 1.1 to 2.0. All while all of these individuals are working 8-6:30 jobs (or am I the only one), supporting a family, and occasionally doing something other than sitting in front of a computer. How many hours is it possible to donate to this project? Maybe four hours a week? I have seen so many promising 'open source' projects with a lone warrior at the helm; the author gets a new job, has life problems, whatever, and the project stagnates. Many developers donate to these projects as a way of getting experience (which is all fine well and good...) but then actually achieve the job they were looking for and forget about the project.

From what I have just read in this post, Robert C. is alive and well, with a post yesterday afternoon (11/14/2006, 6:21:33 PM). Apparently they had a developer go MIA. He says as soon as they get the MIA Developer's source code checked in, they will test the module. Does that mean they have this MIA developer's code in hand and only have to check it in, or does it mean that they can't find this developer and his code and therefore have no clue when they will be releasing?

Also, he made the point they will test and release. As a developer, I will have to incorporate the many changes I have made into the newer source, so I would be happy with ANYTHING that compiles, since I will have to make the modifications anyway. The sooner we get the revised code, the sooner we can ALL make contributions and collectively test.

For Robert: Once you have all the bits in and compiling, would you kindly release these as soon as you get them? Also think about how you can better include the rest of the community in the development of this module, such that if any one developer can't contribute for whatever reason, it will be easier for another community member to pick up the slack (I realize easier said than done, but think about it...).