It's been a busy few weeks since our last release.
Thanks to our new support members
Funding by membership is progressing towards the way I hoped it would. If the trend goes on I will be able to spend much more time on VM core development. More important, however, is the possibility of financing infrastructure upgrades or paying developers for a specific task.
From our side, there is still a lot of work to be done.
I updated the module displaying the purchased license, whilst still far from perfect, it represents a good initial step.
Apologies for the delay in answering our support tickets
There was a siginificant short term increase in support tickets, in the main these were focussed on very similar root problems.
Answering all tickets immediately would have cost a lot of time, so I used this time to solve the issues and to present the solution as quickly as possible. This approach was the best way of utilising development time and testing, but has taken longer than expected.
The dilemma I faced
Of the problems reported, two were having negative impacts on the operation of our customers platforms and lead to impacts on multiple touchpoints within the VirtueMart component.
Most significant in terms of impact was the registered user experience when trying to login and the report of "cannot use joomla login module". This was due to how Joomla 4 now handles the GET, POST and REQUEST data, which impacts all page calls. This issue lead us to discover that the Joomla 4 implementation of VirtueMart 4 was unexpectedly less than optimal. Joomla 3 handles this area differently and was not impacted. I trust that this problem is now resolved.
Secondly were reports of vendors not being able to use the frontend administration. Obviously very challenging for some of our businesses and resulting in a lot of vendors updating their extensions.Investigating that problem I noticed a big quirk due an old pattern. I just checked it, it is there since we have vmmodel (Mai/2011). This pattern tries to recieve the id for the model in the constructor. Prior the router just used own queries, but new optimisations use the category model to reduce the sql. Remember the router is just finding the GET data, while just calling a model tries to use the GET data, which is not there yet. Removing this lead to a cascade of problems, easy to solve, but needed again a lot of testing and any bug was "serious" directly (cannot register, cannot store user,...)
Both problems lead all the time to "strange" bugs and had to be cleaned up asap.
Rapid development of Joomla, PHP and VirtueMart
The software development and support wheel is turning fast at the moment.
Support for PHP 8.2.xx is progressing fast. In the last weeks approx 40 new commits were made in the repository as you can see here: https://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/repository/revisions.
Significant effort has been expended and I hope you can see that the project is moving forward and is on the right path. We anticipate that we are nearing the point where we will be back to a 6-8 month release cycle.
DOWNLOAD VirtueMart 4.0.20 with the Membership
NOW
The joomla updater for VirtueMart works, but you need at least version 4.0.14. Just download the core one time manually from the Order/Download page.