Thread: Customisation or essential modification?

Customisation or essential modification?

I am getting more than a little confused about the difference between customisation and what many consider to be essential modification. The developer doesn't support any customisation and yet there are a number of modifications that are absolutely essential for classipress to function correctly as a classified advertising software. These modifications should be fully supported, even suggested, by the developer.

As it stands classipress doesn't allow multiple purchases, it produces a paypal option for free adverts, it allows posting in parent categories, it doesn't search in subcategories, and so on. The list is quite long and each of the problems has to be solved through some type of hack. Yet I notice that David doesn't get involved in the conversations - presumably because he says these are customisations - and so the solution has to be proposed, tested and implemented entirely at the risk of the user community. I don't think that's very fair.

I've spent a number of weeks studying, configuring and hacking classipress in order to try and produce a software which is both fully functional and user friendly. And I still have to wait for the next update to see whether I've got there or not. I've read almost every thread in the forums to try and understand what classipress can and can't do, and I've tried to suggest various ways to streamline the new features system so that people can know what is going on in order to plan their business development in an intelligent manner. And in spite of the fantastically enthusiastic responses from the moderators and other selfless helpers (you guys know who you are and you're worth your weight in gold) the end result is nearly always the same - silence from the developer and a few suggestions from the crowd.

Well, summer is gradually drawing to an end, as is my patience with classipress. I will await the next update to see how it fares and if I don't see that the software's shortcomings have been seriously dealt with then I'll probably have to shelve it until all the important issues have been sorted. I've bought a lot of software over the last 10 years and I've never had to spend so much time and energy on trying to make anything work as it should be expected to do. This might be acceptable for someone who is dabbling in a part-time project, but my intentions are seriously commercial and the software is only a PART of my project. I simply CANNOT spend so much time trying to sort out the software problems.

And thanks again to all of you who parti****te in this forum because, believe me, without you guys and your incredibly helpful input, classipress would only have one leg to stand on....