Plugins April 10th

[Jeffro]

During the month of April, I'll be talking about the commercialization of WordPress with each week containing a round-table of guests. April 10th is dedicated to plugins and features the following panelists.

Carl Hancock
Ronald Huereca
Jonathan Davis (Pending)

If you have any questions especially if they are business related, submit them here in this thread.

[mogmismo]

• What were your initial design goals for shopp, and do you feel you have met them yet?
• Success on finding answers on the shopp forums vary from types of requests, and you are restructuring how people get support for your product. What are the challenges you have faced with support, and what is your long term goals for giving good community support?
• Your product is GPL at the core, but you sell licenses for upgrades. Has this business model worked for you? If you had to do it over again, would you still use the GPL?
• Your two tiered sales system (developer and single site) seems to work (except for customer confusion). Do you plan on changing that in the future?
• The shopp site has a few "extras" listed, mostly written by Shopp developers. Would you like to eventually extend that to 3rd party developers? What would your stance be on 3rd party developers writing commercial software to extend the shopp system?
• The upcoming 1.1 release seems to focus on cleaning up the core of shopp, and isolating most of the display code that still lingers in the core instead of the templates. There are major additions that many users have requested, such as subscriptions and affiliates. Are you targeting those for 1.2 or for more "plugins" that are an additional charge?
• What challenges have you had keeping up with changes in the core WP engine? Is 3.0 going to be a big challenge for shopp? How does your company manage testing the upgrade path?