JR4 still the best. Why you abondoned this?!

Hi,
It's completely not understandable for me, why you change GREAT JR4 to JR5/JR6 which is for all and no one . Or maybe I'm wrong? If yes - please tell me, if it's possible to find in JR6:
- action module which stores every stream, download for each user. WHY in JR6 I can't check who download or stream each file?! In social-media times where EVERY move is logged in each site?!
- statistics module - People can't get for example information about their files and statistics
... and many more. JR6 is really worse offer than JR4, on which I made musicbox website, which was so cool in this times.

Now I need JR to offer something like newsroom for media users for my label, and unfortunately - I need to use JR4 for this, because in JR6 I can't show this what I need.

It's really strange move from your team, JR Team. Hope you read it and tell me something about future for JR. It's 2021. Why there aren't any cool themes. Sorry, this what's available in Premium pack was great in 2010, but not now! Is this script abondoned?

Best,
Peter
updated by @piteridrecords: 06/27/21 05:54:20AM

Sales. Nobody was buying JR4 but it still took time keep it running.

JR4's focus was to offer a complete "sell music online" package for anyone who wanted to run that type of website. But the number of people wanting to do that got less and less.

JR5 and JR6 focus more on the underlying architecture to be flexible so you can adjust it to fit your needs. The problem was it was still very difficult for non-technical users to understand, so we added many tools to allow non-coders to adjust the system.

Probably the future is custom projects built on jamroom for individual clients who want specialized systems set up instead of releasing more general stuff. So if you want something unique built, contact the team, we can build it for you.

JR6 core is incredibly flexible its built
* genealogy software
* community management systems
* multi-business management platforms
* mobile back-end servers

So i guess you're right when you say JR4 was better as a "sell music online" system, but JR6 is great as a platform for building multi-user systems.

I wish you guys would rebrand the same framework (keeping JR of course) and compete against WordPress, Joomla, Shopify etc. The number of sites I could have built for different businesses using Jamroom is alarming.

I built a martial arts demo for a place in about 30 minutes that was mind blowing using JR. Think about that for a second. Every student had his own page they could upload photos and videos to and share their profile with friends who may also want to be students. They could set up subscriptions and get auto payments. Mass emails to students. Easy cms to make changes. They were so clueless on this stuff I walked away.

I have had many other people to ask me to build them sites that have selling capabilities like hair salons, dog breeders, jewelers but I do not have the time. JR is superbly written and has so many rich features that people want.

Fully agree with you that Jamroom is awesome
And it would be good to take on WordPress, Joomla etc. but our problem is that Jamroom is just five people and we don't have the commercial resources or the millions of $$$s to do this effectively. The other problem is that Jamroom was (and still is mostly) targeted at 'technical' developers who understand templating, modules and the internal concepts of Jamroom that make it totally flexible. That was fine in the beginning but today, most users that try Jamroom don't even know what html is and are expecting a 'drag and drop' website builder (along with its limitations). We then often get very bogged down with support trying to explain to them how to use Jamroom, and they still then go away thinking Jamroom is too hard.

But this is not to say that Jamroom isn't successful. We have a core of dedicated users and Jamroom is still being developed. At the moment we consider Jamroom6 very stable and an ideal platform for any type of site, however complex, which is what we have been concentrating on of late, developing custom sites for a range of clients.


--
Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

@paul

Over the years, non-technical developers such as me have probably asked the same or similar questions over and over. Perhaps it would be possible to build a structured "support forum highlights" of "forum index" page targeted to the most naive users.... something in between a FAQ and the Documentation.

The other feature that could help is an index to sites that have successfully used JR for a representative range of purposes, with some kind of review (provided by the site developers, not by JR) on how this was achieved for each site. This could serve to promote those sites and help new users imagine what can be done, with more or less effort.

Another thought is that it would be great to have a JR Education Foundation that can accept donations and funnel funds to the training and certification of developers who in turn can help naive users to build sites with JR. Having a certification system would make it easier for people to spend what they can spend with more confidence.

Can we hope for a future developer-customer ecosystem in which there are:
JR Architects (high-end developers) who can command high prices for their work (for those who can afford them),
JR Builders who can do reliable, robust structural work, even if it lacks the artistry of the architect, and..
JR Carpenters who can deal with small jobs and basic site maintenance?


--
PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 03/29/21 04:42:22AM