When Plone was merely an infant (oh so many years ago) we were so proud of all it could accomplish. Launch Plone and you launched a community website with membership and a cool wysiwyg editor for keeping content up-to-date (still love ya Epoz). You could even create your document months ahead of time and have it scheduled to show up on the site when you wanted it to.. and then have it "expire" when you didn't need the document visible anymore.

Ecommerce was nonexistent (unless you hand-rolled something with Python). Documentation back then was as sparse as any other Open Source project at the time (it was a given). We didn't care.. we learned how to use the system through trial and error.. and we created our own documentation through mailing lists and spur-of-the-moment tutorials popping up on websites and weblogs (blogs).

We didn't really need ecommerce. Most of our sites were brochureware, non-profit community sites and corporate intranets (I know I built quite a few Plone based corporate intranets).

The needs of the average online proprietor has changed. He wants to manage his entire business through his web site. He wants security and workflow easy-to-use browser based wysiwyg editors and he wants to have the ability to take orders online. Whether that's orders for a product (digital or otherwise) or provision of a service the business owner provides he needs to know that if he wanted to sell something online, he could.

There has been a lot of discussion over that last few years of potential ecommerce applications but many attempts have fallen by the wayside due to lack of funding and interest. Let me be the first to say I'm one of the guilty ones, I jump up and down and complain about our lack of ecommerce functionality and yet.. here we sit a couple years later with limited options.

Integrators need to be able to tell potential converts that ecommerce implementation is a priority. Please take note I said A priority.. doesn't have to be number one..but it really needs to be brought forward as a major concern because as a developer/designer who has worked on other CMS's.. it seems counterproductive to act as if lack of ecommerce is not affecting adoption of this project in some larger deployments.

Ecommerce implementation matters and I propose we plan a week long ecommerce/documentation sprint and make strides towards creating the most secure, most UI friendly and highest quality ecommerce system out there.. (and get our documenters together to keep the fire stoked in improving our documentation story)

Let's not let this spark fizzle out..