With the week coming to an end, it's time for another progress report.
Before diving into the details, we'd like to mention that, as of last week, progress reports do not appear on the Particl News start page anymore. We've opted to create a specific section for it named "Progress" and available on the navigation bar at the top of this page. This reduces the bloat on the start page and makes it easier to follow the course of events that surround Particl. Follow the link here to get all the progress reports.
Now let's get to the interesting part!
Particl Desktop Development Progress
A good portion of the week has been spent on improving SMSG messages propagation and handling from Particl Desktop to fix an outstanding issue that caused problems for some users. A change was made to the marketplace handling of the response from core regarding sent messages; instead of failing only when a specific failure case is met, it should now fail for everything unless it meets specific success criteria. Although the fix still requires more testing, it's likely that the issue is fixed by now. A few other reported issues are being looked into, as is usual.
Aside from that, progress has continued over the previously-stated items, gradually leading up to the Particl Desktop 3.1 version.
- Several features related to better vendor inventory import/update. This includes the provision of a product code (allowing for updates to items via CSV amongst other things), the ability to update pricing via the batch publish window, and the ability to import images through the CSV file directly (with the possibility to specify the category and target market directly from the CSV coming soon as well). This task has been marked with notable progress this week.
- The usage of markdown in product descriptions on the marketplace for better, more customizable formatting. This task has already been started but has been put on pause until the above items are completed. It is estimated that this item will be completed very quickly once its development resumes.
- Enable the sale of digital items with no physical shipping address requirement (i.e., download links, NFTs, user codes, etc.). This task has not been started yet.
Particl Core and Other Development Progress
This week on the Core side of things, a lot of merges and updates have gone into Particl Core and the SMSG network. Notably, some investigation and work have gone towards looking into reducing marketplace listing fees, which should go into effect in a future hardfork. As always, you can track Particl Core developments by checking out the Github repository here.
Additionally, BasicSwap has received a lot of focus this week with breakthrough achievements being reached. Stay tuned for more details soon!
Marketplace Listing Seeding Proposal
Finally, there have been a few questions regarding the fully-funded Listing Seeding Proposal and its development status. We can confirm that the proposal is indeed under development at this present time, but as mentioned in the proposal, it is being done mostly outside of Particl's regular work scope. It's also being developed in a private capacity.
Since publishing the proposal, several iterations have been explored and the project has evolved into a more important undertaking. While we do not want to confirm any final structure at this moment, we are working towards making the system more open ended-instead of limited to the members who initially published the proposal.
Indeed, we are heavily considering making the "listing seeding system" usable by any community member looking to populate the marketplace with listings and manage them from a web interface.
As a final note on this subject, it's important to be aware that this proposal is now dependent on a few upcoming items, notably the SMSG Controller roadmap item. Additionally, while not a hard requirement, it would highly benefit from SMSG 2.0 which, if you remember, is expected to dramatically increase the scalability of Particl apps and services.
From now on, we will include development updates for this proposal, when there is any to mention, in the weekly progress reports such as this one.
We wish you a great weekend and thank you all for your incredible support and passion for the project's mission. We often mention it, but it's never enough; you are what makes Particl possible and we are grateful to have such an awesome community along for the ride!
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