[ic] Wanted: Support Group - opinions?

[Jeff Dafoe]

> I recently brushed up on Perl, thanks to 'The Llama'; something that was
> necessary to make sense of the payment modules, however, I am still
> struggling to complete my module because there is no documented
specification
> (that I have found) on things like passing form variables and return
values.
> Having already posted to the list, it is now a matter of searching through
> the source to see what is actually going on behind the scenes, and had it
not
> been for the other modules, I would be completely clueless.

    Making a new payment module can be a tricky task with any ecommerce
system.

> but even if you know your way around Perl, who wants to become an expert
in
> the internal workings of Interchange when all you're really trying to do
is
> get an online store setup?!

    I think the issue is that Interchange is a web application framework and
Foundation is the reference ecommerce implementation.  If you want
Foundation to do something that it doesn't do already then you will have to
invest some time to understand how the underlying app framework works.  If
you just want an online store set up as fast as possible, then you should
pick a gateway that already has a module for it.

> Interchange is already a powerful and fully featured program, so I would
much
> rather see work go into the documentation than into further development of
> the software.

    I disagree, because as Mike pointed out, no matter how good the docs
are, less than 10% of the people will use it.  As widely used as Apache is,
it's API was largely undocumented until the O'Reilly book came out.  There's
what we need, an O'Reilly book on Interchange.

> I haven't forgotten that this is free (both in terms of price
> and being open source) software, and I am very grateful for the efforts of
> the developers and supporters, but I think many would agree that
> priorities should be shifted towards the docs.

    I would disagree only to suggest that someone needs to take the reins of
the documentation from the already-overworked core team.  I have thought of
doing this countless times, the problem is that the existing documentation
already contains almost every thing I have looked for and the people who
suggest that the documentation is inadequate never cite specific examples of
what the documentation is missing, so there really isn't anything to be
done.

    Just some thoughts...

Jeff