Hi,
I have been doing a bit of work on e-Commerce moving towards the new release. I am also stepped back and taken a look at what is important and what is needed to be released. Basically when it was all broken down it there are 3 major areas which need to be completed.
- Charges I need to get this finished so that we can start building up the the different plugins to allow people to create any charge that they require.
- Views integration I have been quite a bit on this, but there is still alot that can be done. Also where this will be really powerful is that it means that we can create any report or user listing that is needed. This is really I feel is something that other people can do to contribute to e-Commerce. Just submit the exports of views and if they will be something that lots of people will use I will include them into e-Commerce by default. If something is missing I will add what is required which is usually very easy.
- Rules Lastly is the rules integration which will allow store administrators to completely customise the workflow be be exactly how you work, and not how e-Commerce things you should work.
The main area where just about anyone can help make e-Commerce be the great system that I see it being is the views integration. You do not need to be a developer you just need to have a basic understanding of views 2 and how to pull together the views. And I am wanting to help anyone who is doing this by providing the building blocks to pull this together.
At this stage I am thinking that I will have the final stable release of 4.0 will be done by the end of Q1 which will be great and then I can start updating to Drupal 7 to be ready for the final release. This will be possible since there should only be minimal changes between releases. Basically it should only be extending the API to help other module developers and updates to take advantage of the new version of Drupal or the other dependant modules.
There is only 1 big floor in my vision for e-Commerce. I will be relying a lot on contributed modules which will extend e-Commerce and make it better. But then again this is exactly like Drupal which is that the majority of it's success is the contributed modules that makes Drupal great.