Community Roadmap

[Koby Oz]

Hi Guys,

As a start for the next CAB meeting, which will take place on I would like to present everyone with the features which the Magento team has accepted for inclusion into the Community Edition roadmap for the upcoming versions.  These are based on the ideas which were selected from UserVoice and submitted to the team.  The team feels they are most equipped to implement the following features:

* Edit order without creating a new one.

* Custom order statuses

* Improve the Webservice this is in process and we will have much more released this year

* Better Import Functionality

* Removal of Javascript requirements for Front End: We will only work on the multistep checkout with no JS for this year.

For the first of these, "Editing an Order Without Creating A New One" the team has requested more feedback from the community and CAB to determine specifications for this feature.  I have spoken to several CAB members individually about this over the last few weeks and yesterday/today.  As there are several different ideas, I'd like to get them out on this thread so that they are available for each other, as well as the team, to look at.  

As per my knowledge, as far as the UserVoice page goes, most of the comments were requesting a simple edit functionality, mostly for customer addresses, etc, in case of an input error.  I think that would appease 90% of the people who requested the feature.  On the other hand, some of you have suggested maybe it would be more proper to enable this functionality as using "change orders".  There have also been other concerns brought up regarding how changes affects product and order totals and payments.

Can everyone please provide their feedback here so that we have an official record and so that we can work with the team on defining a final set of specs?

Thanks,

Koby

[Koby Oz]

BTW, the next meeting is on Monday, June 21st, as per the published schedule.

[Lee Saferite]

Koby,

This is from Joff Redfern at flattenme.com

His site has lots of custom work, but they use the product custom options to store per-purchase customization on the product (name, gender, etc.).  He would like to see order editing respect the parameters established for the custom option on the product.  Currently even creating an order from scratch in the AdminUI will not give you a proper editor for custom options.

Lee

Some quick feedback for Magento ...

• Once you allow order item editing you introduce a new "actor" for the Magento Admin – Operations staff. Numerous times per week a customer will call our 800 phone number requesting a change to a name on product, shipping address, etc. This creates a challenge as Magento Admin is really designed for the store owner or administrator. Magento Admin mixes store setup, sales volume, operational issues, etc. all in one. Magento really needs a better way to slice up Admin so the different actors only see what‘s pertinent to them. We don‘t want operations people viewing sales volume. I know there are some features to help particularly in Enterprise, but last time I looked it didn't provide me with the fine tune controls we needed.

• Because we produce custom products our primary use case is editing an order item. For example, we allow the user to add a dedication to their book. Sometimes a user will be reviewing their order confirmation e-mail and notice that they misspelled a word. They‘ll call and request we change that. We needed to give our operations staff a quick way to edit that order and change the misspelled word so we extended Admin to allow for that.
  

• When Magento builds this functionality at a minimum I would expect that the Admin user could go to the order page and either edit an order item in-situ on the Order View page using Ajax, or click edit and be brought to another page that allows the user to edit all of the custom options for that order item.
  

• There's also another use case for stores that sell custom products vs. pushing boxes that you might address. Take a store like Tinyprints.com. They sell lots of cards. Users come to their site and create a custom message for their card and then order hundreds of printed cards. As part of Tinyprints offering they review the text on every card submitted. Going into each order in Admin one at a time to proof text would be impractical. It would be better if there was an iTunes coverflow-like feature where an ops person could quickly flip through each of the order items and see if changes to the custom options are needed or not. If so, allow them to quickly make that edit in-situ. That's hot and has strategic implications for Magento. IT STARTS TO MOVE MAGENTO FROM THE THING THAT MANAGES MY ECOMMERCE SITE TO THE THING THAT MANAGES MY ENTIRE BUSINESS. Given the open source extensibility of Magento there is no reason it could not be that 1 stop shop for "running the company". That charter also gets Magento a different market valuation.

• Back to order editing … Editing a custom option should use the same boundary conditions set for the custom option and used by the website. E.g. if a custom option only allows for a text entry of 14 chars then trying to enter 15 chars via admin should produce an error.

• As an aside, we‘ve also customized the API to allow for editing of order items and in an ideal world any editing done on an order item – website, Admin or API – should all enforce the same boundary check for the custom options

• In addition to editing the order item you should be able to edit the Billing Address, Shipping Address, Shipping Method. It would also be great to be able to issue a Paypal refund directly from the Magento interface vs. having to go to Paypal

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[Lee Saferite]

This is from Alex Kirsch at SignSite.com

They currently provide several hundred store fronts on Magento.

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I have mixed emotions on order editing in general;

IMHO editing should be limited to:

• Qty Changes / Price Changes
  
• Shipping Information
• Billing Information
• Payment Information

Anything else sounds more like a new order then an edit.

[Lee Saferite]

[Vinai Kopp]

Hi Koby,

thanks for this mail, great to see progress. Also thanks Lee for the great feedback!
Regarding the order-editing, besides the option to update custom product options and addresses, changing the options on configurable products has also been requested (different size e.g.).
Since that would be much more complex to implement compared to the custom product options I guess the latter would be good enough.

Another often requested feature for order editing was changing the payment status of invoices (both to payed and to unpayed).

Thanks,

Vinai