Hello! As it’s been some time since the last public news about Commerce, I decided to write up a few things related to the early access and an updated timeline for when you’ll get your hands on Commerce.
A bunch of quick, unedited, mini-updates, if you will.
Yesterday I’ve closed the early access signup form on the Commerce landing page, and started dividing all 133 names into different invite groups. We’re not accepting any new signups for early access until we hit beta, so this is it!
There’s also a new Commerce landing page almost ready. This will give more information about the priorities with Commerce, what features it has, a roadmap until we’re going to call v1.0 a stable and production ready release, and more. Hopefully that’ll be live in the next week or so.
I also wanted to give an update on the timelines for Commerce as I see them today. As said before, the early access will consist of alpha and beta versions of Commerce and we’ll slowly add more people to that so the feedback is manageable.
How the signups have been split up into groups is pretty arbitrary based on various subjective variables. The primary goal is to give people access at the time they can make the most of Commerce, so that’s based on what I know about the person and the information they gave during signup.
As for the alpha timeline:
- First invites will go out before the end of the year (yes, this year!), probably in the last week. This will be a very early and limited alpha, with invites for about 5-10 people as the first batch. These are people selected from the early access signups that we already know as great bug finders, and people that we think will see through incomplete pieces to understand the potential Commerce can offer. These tend to be back-end developers as well, so they’ll be able of getting more done with Commerce with less documentation.
- A few weeks later (mid January) when we’ve worked through the initial round of feedback and have completed more in-progress features and documentation, there’ll be a second group of another 10-15 alpha testers. These people fit the same profile but cover a bit more broad spectrum of development skill.
- The third and fourth group of alpha testers (~ 20-25 people) will get access late January/early February. Whether these are all in one batch or spread out a bit as well very much depends on the feedback we get and progress we make with the first two groups.
At this point, the base v1 features should be in place. They wont be perfect, bug-free, or 100% complete, but it should be beta ready.
Based on the above timeline, beta would be around mid/late February.
For the beta period there are 90 or so remaining early access signups. I’ve not yet broken that down into smaller groups, and might just do that group alphabetically or something random. Right now I’m expecting we’ll do about 10-20 invites per week during the beta until everyone has an invite, but it’s also possible Commerce is holding up so well during alpha and beta testing that they all go out at once, or that we hold off on invites in some weeks to make it through the feedback before adding more to it.
During the beta we’ll also accept beta requests again. Anyone that’s not yet on my invite list can then request to be added again.
Until we start the beta, we will not be selling licenses to discourage people from actually doing client projects with it, only development licenses will be available. We’re serious about the whole “not ready for production” thing.
Early access testers will be able of getting a discount on production licenses. The exact discounts and how to get them are to be determined, but we’ll let you know around the time we hit beta and open up license sales.
If you’d like to know in what group I’ve put you (cough cough or to bribe me into moving up the list, I like whiskey cough cough), just comment on this topic or send an email to support@modmore.com and I’ll look you up.
Finally, as you all know, timelines are incredibly tricky so it is totally possible that in a few months we’ll look back at this post and laugh (or cry). I’m pretty confident about this timeline, but I’ve been really wrong about this sort of thing before.
Thanks for your patience,
Mark
