For the past 2 months I've been working very hard to implement e-commerce as a new feature for mojoPortal. The project had minimal sponsorship from BrainBeacon who were my initial customer for this feature. They only needed to sell one downloadable product initially and they wanted to use the Authorize.NET payment gateway and they wanted to go live with their store in April 2007. After meeting their initial needs I planned to flesh out more features to support a broader array of e-commerce scenarios. Unfortunately, as I was about to work with them for initial testing they decided to dissolve their company and no longer plan to open a store or use the e-commerce feature.

Since I have no immediate need to use this feature myself I'm in a bit of a quandry as its hard to polish a feature that is not being used by real users and when no-one is available to provide feedback. So in short I'm looking for a new customer for this feature before I continue with any further development effort. I think having e-commerce will be a great feature and add to the popularity of mojoPortal but it will be hard to complete it until I have someone who wants to use it for actual e-commerce who is willing to provide testing and actual use and feedback. If you are interested in using this feature and possibly sponsoring continued development please contact me. Most of the feature is already built. If you need to sell a few downloadable products its pretty much ready for testing, if you have shipped products or additional scenarios I can work with you to implement the needed enhancements.

Update 4/4/2007:  I'm starting to get a few inquiries about this so I thought it best if I post some specific information about the kind of help that is needed to complete this project. The main point is that e-commerce is not a trivial feature, if it were a trivial feature it would be enough for me to test it to my own satisfaction but with a feature this complex I really need folks who can test it from a customer perspective and provide feedback until it meets their real needs. Developer's should not be the ones to do QA (Quality Assurance) testing on a feature they have built themselves, the more complex the feature the more validation is required from business users of the feature.

Ideally I'm looking for someone who can:
1. set up their own test environment using mojoPortal retrieved directly from svn branches/2.x and get it built with VS 2005 sp1 and running using MS SQL Server
2. Setup a test account at Authorize.NET so you can test your transactions against the Authorize.NET payment processing system
3. Test all aspects of the e-commerce solution administrative features and user features and provide feedback

I will respond to the feedback then the tester(s) will do a fresh svn update to retrieve my changes from svn rebuild the system and confirm improvements or submit additional feedback.

I am willing to do this with or without sponsorship but without sponsorship the pace of the process will be much slower because I will be fitting it in during spare time around my other customer work. If I get some financial sponsorship then it will be prioritized into my workflow along with other customer work but this will be substantially higher priority than without sponsorship. Sponsorship also means you can specify additional requirements and priorities within the project. If you need a different payment gateway than Authorize.NET I'm certainly willing to implement others for example.

Those who want to participate as testers and/or sponsors please contact me, then get started with step 1 above. I will then provide some additional instructions for setting up the store once your test site is working from the latest svn /branches/2.x