Photopost and vBGallery Future / No Future?

[StuartDH]

Reading lots of recent about Zach leaving vBGallery, and Michael taking over development, it leaves me wondering what's the future for both apps.

I moved away from vBGallery a year ago when it was obviously not being developed much and many customers started to jump ship when it looked like it wasn't going to change. Now it looks as though most of the predictions are coming true, but this new stage presents a problem with Photopost.

Michael has now taken over development of vBGallery, even though there's lots that still need to done to Photopost. Development has always been slow on Photopost, and now it looks like it's going to get a lot slower. Tons of feature requests have been ignored for years, photopost looks and feels out of date, and it lacks lots of web 2.0 features

So where do we stand? Is Michael the only developer of both software? Can we get an honest roadmap for both products?

For example, better SEO...will it ever happen? I think the simple answer is 'No', but that's very sad given the amount of SEO requests that have been made for years.

The documentation seems to have always been lacking. Errors that I pointed out two years ago on the installation page still haven't been fixed and then you spend a huge amount of time telling your customers how solve problems that could have been avoided by better documentation. It seems as though it's a shambles and you're just drowning in more work.

Is all this just falling on deaf ears because Scott doesn't seem to get involved much and Michael doesn't have the autonomy/budget/staff to solve the many issues that exist with both software?

[Chuck S]

Well the simple truth is both applications are going forward. I code both Reviewpost and Classifieds and try and do at least one big release a year and then minor dot releases throughout the year the fix issues.

Now I am not sure how long you have been a customer but the releases we have had of both Gallery versions releases have been at least one big version release and some minor fix releases a year. vbulletin for example can take years to release anything but a dot bug fix version look how long it took to go from 2.x to 3.x or 3.0 to 3.5 series years of development inbetween. I know this because I have been a vbulletin customer since the early early 2.0 days.

Anyway from a Development standpoint Scott has committed in other threads similar to this on trying to update the pro interface to web 2.0 features although the market is getting flooded right now with 2.0 bugs. Photopost Pro still has more features then most galleries and we strive to keep adding more. As far as SEO I would suspect this would be looked at but with most software when Michael codes new versions he makes a list of new features and prioritizes things and that has not made the list yet since we have had our own working SEO links. Newer features customers have requested where added.

Looking at any feature list on any new Photopost software version you can clearly see that all our features are things our customers ask for and we strive to continue this direction. I would expect at least a major update of each product per year with minor releases through out to fix issues.