I'm sure everyone in this small community of users/lurkers/and hopeful users all wants to see ViArt get bigger and stronger - it's in our best interests. I'm sure we're all re-enthused with the 4.0 release, but to really get this to be good, ViArt needs to get bigger and stronger.
 
An evaluation of Viart's strengths and weaknesses will tell you this:
 
Features: Strong
Usability: Strong
Performance: Strong
 
Backend Administration: Good (vastly improved but not yet strong)
 
Support: Limited (weakness)
User Interfaces: techie (weakness)
Documentation: Limited (weakness)
User Community: Small (weakness)
 
This points to a startup company with good tech resources, but limited product marketing, US creators and documentation resources.
 
For this software to gain real traction, focus must be put on some of these weaknesses, particularly the ones that techies often poo-poo as unimportant - like the basic user templates, docs, and ease of backend use. Some work needs to be done in product marketing too so more people consider ViArt. I like to use examples of much lesser products that have gained traction mostly BECAUSE they tended to the important look, feel and use parts of the product. OpenCart is a good example: very clean UI and doc set neatly wrapped around a simple feature set. It has traction and quite frankly if I could live with such a simple set of features I'd probably head off and use it. The biggest software company in the world uses this approach - that's partly how they smothered some great techie products like Lotus 123, WordPerfect, Netware, OS/2, Netscape, cc:mail only to name a few.
 
I'm speculating sales have not been all that strong and the revenues from hosted services are OK but not sustaining. They need money, user, and technical support.
 
As users we can provide some things:
1) Guidance by testing and organizing our thoughts on what should be done next to keep us and ViArt competitive. This can fill in for product marketing so long as we cooperate and don't individually bombard the developers with our own requests.
 
2) We can also provide help by testing. Everyone should try the beta, kick it around and feedback problems and observations.
 
3) Co-developing features or documentation. Perhaps one of us can setup a wiki that would fill in for a while. If there are any template/css junkies out there, an esthetic cleanup to the default template (make it look like OpenCart) would be huge.
 
4) Money. Perhaps we could pool some money to fund a little development. Personally I think things like cleaning up a default template would be a weeks work for a mid level designer. If we raised $500 as a gratuity, would anyone be interested?
 
Any other thoughts on making this community bigger would be welcome. I've built 5 carts with this software, in all but 1 case my customer loved the functionality but got skittish because the front/backend look and feel was a little off.
 
Off the soapbox.

Hi Wazoodle,
 
Great points. I know I will happily stick around whether or not ViArt becomes a strong force in the market. But I agree I'd love for them to become wildly successful, it would help all of us.
 
Two points may be stronger than your estimate:
 
Documentation - did you notice that ViArt quietly introduced an update of 3.6 documentation a few months back? It's very impressive. I hope their new 4.0 documentation will be as good.
 
Support - sometimes their support gets backed up, but my own experience and what I see others saying, is that their thoughtfulness and their solutions both score consistently high.
 
I agree, I'd love to see a bigger community. I agree this will come with more and more users. I wish all of us including ViArt great success!!!
 
Greg

Wazoodle, I just re-read your email. I'd contribute to an appreciation fund or "gratuity". Many companies would be charging a lot for this new upgrade, and it looks like ViArt is not planning to do that. I'd happily toss in $25. I haven't downloaded or seen the new version yet, but agree that a great default template would be excellent.
 
Greg

Hi Wazoodle,
 
Thanks for your suggestions. We're working hard to improve our documentation and support. To confirm this we're going to add Skype support from August, 1st, 2010.
Also in the nearest future we are planning to launch the Support Chat - to provide instant support to Viart users.
And of course a big hope is to complete the manual for versions 3.6-4.0
 
With kind regards,
ViArt Support Team
 

It has been worth remaining loyal to Viart - that's excellent Anjula. Thank you.