I Suggest a RocketTheme Beta Team - Call them: Star Troops
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- xtianus
- Elite Rocketeer
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I have noticed 2 things with my short stint at RT. Great product but very lacking in terms of support for specific issues.
Of course any company would love to be all things to all people but that is not life and I understand. However, I believe a Beta team would be of great benefit for many many reasons.
1st. It puts people more in touch with the development side of your templates and allows those people to share tips and experiences from a member point of view rather than solely on a moderator level.
2nd. I don't know what the ticket workflow is of addressing serious issues and or concerns people have but the current setup can yeild a lot of wating when the issue could have begun to be worked on via the backend but the message of such news is never recieved on the front end.
3rd. The products released will be more polished and overall stunning to the members who uses them rather than being beta'd onto the public during release.
4th. The quality of RT's work increases and the overall impression and desire of the RT product should increase percipitously leading to increased sales and higher customer satisfaction.
5th. I can go on and on why this is a smart idea but I will leave that to RT to decide.
With that said this proposal will probably fall on deaf ears and well there's my point
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- xtianus
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 500
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Seriously someone just voted NO on who needs a Beta team. LOL, really Lets call up windows and tell them to cancel all Beta's and just release products onto the market. Tell Apple to keep letting their people Beta test though. Lets see who would be the number one OS after that.
Come on that is silly to say.
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- JEM
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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Basically, we have a 'beta-team'
www.rockettheme.com/the-team
Each month, nothing short of a miracle, at least a dozen moderators and team members participate in the preparation of the new template.
(The same holds true for extensions, they are tested extensively before release.)
We are in constant contact, chat, post bug reports, make suggestions for enhancements, etc.
This all takes dedication as builds may change daily and to keep up with the flow you have to keep up with the latest release.
Having a 'beta-team', as you suggest reminds me of the expression 'too many cooks spoil the broth'.
It's a tight knit process, and we do our best to keep up and not overlap in reporting, but IMHO, if we had a 'beta-team' as you suggest, unless the people involved were staying up to date daily, sometimes hourly, it would bog down the system, inundating it with issues that are currently posted or solved in the latest release.
Just as any other software company, we fully test our products before release, and release the best product possible...
Of course, nobody's perfect, so someone, somewhere may find a bug, which we always address expediently.
Nice thought, but I don't think you will see this happening, there no way RT could release pre-release betas 'into the wild' to those who are not a member of the team or mod-squad.
Bottom line, if we actually implemented a 'beta-team', I see two things happening...
A) Warez sites would be full of pre-release versions.
Competitors would be signing up as 'beta-team' members to get a look at the template before the first of the month.
- Thanks,
jim
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- xtianus
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 500
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To A) and ....
People can warez whatever they want and in fact it might just be a badge of honor. If it is that good people will know where to come for the real thing. But the concern is understandable.
I honestly don't know of another template builder like RT. I truly believe you guys are in a class by yourselves. Even the closest competetitor is so different I beg they would care that much to sneak in on the RT marketplace. Kind of like Apple and MS if you ask me.
but in all seriousness from my time here at RT I have wittnessed two things.
1. Awesomeness
2. Frustration with support
3. A need for a more extensive beta team.
Beta teams let support know what exactly is wrong and what needs to be done to fix issues that various people may have.
A team RT has but a Beta team RT does not have. The idea that I can report a bug and not have a ticket format or some type of acknowledgement of what or how that bug may be fixed is a very frustrating endevor.
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- David Goode
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Designer and Host
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Nothing wrong with the concept, other than the RT product is a monthly release and beta panels would just inject more debate. That in turn takes the team away from the core task of producing awesome templates.
I have been on beta teams for other Joomla extensions but all of them are once or twice a year updates. That sort of timeframe makes a big difference to the effectiveness of a beta group.
As for your comments about Microsoft and Apple, they exactly fit in with my previous statement. Neither of them release a new product each month, every month. Sure, they release updates but their products have a wider scope than our templates :cheesy:
Interesting topic though
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- xtianus
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 500
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You are 100% correct about the monthly releases. however, with an extension like RokGallery I am almost certain that took a while to build as it is so complex and Amazing.
With that said, a B-Team being allowed to come in the last week or so to make sure no snags have been left unturn could have been beneficial IMHO.
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