I wanted to take a minute to talk about thirty bees as a company, what we are and what we are not. Our thoughts, our principals, and part of our path forward. We are starting out as a fork, but we are not going to let that define us. Our code base, code style, and vision is moving forward quickly. We want to make our merchants successful and to do that we have to make tough decisions that can affect our revenue and thirty bees as a company.

 

Our core principals

We have several core principles for thirty bees, but if we had to pick one main thought out it would be “to develop software that works for merchants”. This admittedly encompasses a lot. In the end our  goal for thirty bees is a software package that merchants can set up easily, start selling their products, with a minimal invest in paid modules to make the store work. Some platforms strip our features because they are better sold. That is not our philosophy. A core tenet of our business model is to never sell modules that thirty bees develops.  We are an open source company, we will find other paths to revenue. When an open source company starts selling products they develop to their users, they start straying away from being open source. This is a belief we are not willing to compromise on.

Because stability is an issue, we cannot set ourselves to a time based roadmap. We are not going to box ourselves in with a calendar and set ourselves up for failure. We have seen too many companies do that. We will however start publishing a roadmap of the features and changes we aim at for each version and subversion. We think by doing this it will give a clearer picture for those that want to help, while at the same time giving merchants something to look forward to. But one thing we do want to make clear is that we are a feature driven development company. As we rewrite the core software we will also be writing in new features. Features that will over time make us the cutting edge ecommerce software. Features that you as merchants want. That is the point of our feature request system.

Soon we will start plotting the features that can be done from the feature requests, and some of our own features as well, to a roadmap. We will start showing what features will be worked on in what versions. This not only helps merchants, it helps with community development as well. It lets other developers know what we need help with currently, so they can jump in and help. If you are a developer reading this and wondering what we need help with now, it is testing. We want to build a comprehensive testing framework that covers all of the code. Having automated testing is going to help us produce the best quality software. It is one of those behind-the-scenes things that users and merchants never really see, but they do understand bug-free shops. This will be our next major time investment before the next version.

In the process so far we have been really fortunate to have such a great group of loyal followers. It really makes working on thirty bees so much easier. The contributions from the community have been awesome and they are growing every day. The kind words, the notes, the way people encourage us in what we have started mean a lot to us! That is why we felt like we should make clear our goals and our principals. We want you as a community to hold us accountable and let us know if we let you down. Thanks for being such an awesome community!