VW shopping cart & VW reviews? Why on earth?

[Alfa1]

I am not understanding the rationale behind building a shopping cart and a reviews system in VW. Its not that these are not nice features, but it comes at a time when we are waiting for a Gold release of VW4 for years now. There are many popular feature requests that would greatly enhance VW4, but those have not been implemented yet. VW4 still offers no compelling reason to upgrade from VW3.

I'm sorry to perceive this move as negative while there must have gone a lot of effort into the projects. But I really don't understand why. Is it because you need these functions for your own site?

Is Vaultwiki going to shift focus towards a shopping cart instead?
Will there be an option to download VW without the bloat of a shopping cart and reviews? It seems to me that this package may add unwanted weight to the software.

Several VW customers invested thousands in the creation of reviews software with a shopping cart. After 6 months of development its now in beta release.
We would probably not have invested if we knew that VW was going to implement reviews and cart. Or maybe you would not have invested manhours into the project if you knew that the functionality was already underway. I'm not sure. The functionality is not in any VW milestone.

Could you share your rationale behind the decision to develop a shopping cart and reviews system, while the wiki system is far from ready?

[pegasus]

We are gradually moving away from vBulletin on our own site, to use XenForo here. The shopping cart we were using previously was custom built, but was designed for vBulletin. So it was just one of the site functions we would have needed to rebuild to make the move to XenForo.

Even if there was a shopping cart for XenForo already, we would not be able to use it immediately due to so many features being custom built, and that we are not ready to move now thanks to other features we need. To be honest, we have needed to update our shopping cart for a long long time in order to implement much needed/requested features, to make some existing features easier to use, and to reduce the amount of resources it was asking from our server whenever a user wanted to download VaultWiki. It would have been an utter mess doing these things under the previous codebase for the cart, and it seemed the longer we put it off, the more issues seemed to compound, so rebuilding the cart was not something we were prepared to keep putting off.

So we gave ourselves some breathing room by making our internal shopping cart software platform-agnostic, and it seemed the best way to do this, especially if we ever decided to market it (after all, users have asked us in the past if we would), was to use VaultWiki as a framework.

VaultWiki itself is not going to shift towards being a shopping cart. If we decide to release it, it would be an add-on option to VaultWiki, and it still needs a lot of work to be ready for distribution. Our preliminary spec suggests that a cart product would be like a new wiki page-type, like a Book or a Category is now, and that the product description page itself, any specs, or other info would be content on that wiki page. That is actually how we've done it for years ourselves both here and on our other sites.

The system is not designed as a "Reviews" system. It is a shopping cart currently with support for digital downloads and other web-based services through a Members-type area. I think I just mention somewhere that someone can use the standard comments section to post a product "review" of sorts if they wanted to.

For reference, this is the corresponding tracker issue, posted appropriately in the "Site Issues" section: https://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/3697/
In there I note that we actually started working on it six months ago. I felt it needed to be posted more publicly, because we rarely post anything in-house-related that we work on, and I don't like that.

[Alfa1]

Thanks for the explanation. It seems I misunderstood much of your post. Especially this part:

We now have brand new shopping cart software. This new software is built completely on top of VaultWiki, scripted using VaultWiki's generic libraries, and with the ability to use wiki pages as product description and review pages. Aside from the implications this has for the future of VaultWiki

There are some very good license managers available for xenforo. I know at least 3 developers who have coded their own. Not all of them are available on xenforo.com though.