As someone who checks the forum regularly enough (even if I can’t read or reply in every single topic), I understand why you feel that way. What I say here probably can’t change that, but it can explain why things are as they are.
Alas, we can’t always provide “everything that any other CMS has, and more”. Nobody can. If someone made a product like that, it would conquer the market. Even then, there would be room for competitors “who do that one or two things better” (simply because of the scope).
When many people use the software, they have many different expectations from it. Implementing everything at once is impossible, even for large corporations. So we make changes step by step, and we have to set priorities. “Product Reviews” is one such thing that we’re overhauling now, after multiple requests from the community. The next big change will probably be related to vendor panel and its ease of use (although it’s too early to say for sure).
Now to the bug tracker, overhauling add-ons (like “Buy together”, “Bestsellers”, etc.), and the “Working as designed” status… As you know, we’ve set a rule for ourselves to fix bugs in 45 days. That timer starts once the bug is confirmed (the fastest way to get it is confirmed is to contact us via Help Desk).
That “45 days rule” creates a fine line between:
“the functionality that’s already there and should work (except that for some reason it doesn’t)”
AND
“the functionality that wasn’t there before, but would be nice or even essential for my business”
The first will usually be confirmed as a bug once checked. The second is important too; but we can’t guarantee to implement every single request for new functionality within 45 days from reviewing that request. That’s why such requests at the bug tracker get labeled as “Working as designed”. Even if we don’t change the behavior immediately, we track such requests as well. So eventually, when we overhaul certain functionality of the product, we take all that feedback into account.
So, “Working as designed” often means: “That’s a perfectly valid point, and we’ll keep it in mind for future versions. I’ll be sure to let the team know. Unfortunately, I can’t make any promises yet as to how and when it will change. That’s because plans may change, and I’d hate to make false promises.”
As for applying new technologies… I’m pretty sure that any developer would prefer to “get rid of all the old stuff and and use bleeding-edge tech”. But that’s balanced out by the need to make it easy for existing CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor users to move to newer versions and get new stuff. If we made radical changes to our code every release, third-party add-ons would require constant reworking as well.
That’s why we focus on backward compatibility and the ease of updating add-ons for 4.x.x versions. All the big changes that break backward compatibility are reserved for version 5.x.x (as recommended by
semantic versioning).
We don’t usually announce big long-term plans. That’s because the situation and priorities can change. That’s why announcements are usually made when a product is close to release. But we often get questions about version 5.x of CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor, so… yes, we’re working on it.
Its focal points are planned to be:
- “Mobile first” approach to design.
- “API first” approach to architecture.
- Performance and scalability.
- Ease of development (to allow for more add-ons and themes).
Once we can tell more about version 5, we’ll let you know.