Hi - I'll attempt to address your questions one-by-one:
1) Gift Cards. Gift cards are a more complex item than what could be created simply in the core admin. Dispensation through your payment partner must be made for creating and processing gift cards. That isn't to say that such a mechanisms couldn't be added to your Broadleaf admin as a new module, but we wouldn't know who your payment partner is ahead of time. With our upcoming 1.5 release, we're adding in a completely new admin application based on SmartGWT that will provide much better support for addition of custom modules. Having said all this, Broadleaf does support multiple payment types for an order and there is already API to handle gift cards specifically as a mode of payment - there just needs to be a payment integration module behind if for your payment processor.
2) Wishlists. The purpose of wishlists currently is indeed a rather simple one. The idea is that someone browsing your catalog might identify one or more products that he/she is interested, but may not be ready to buy at that exact moment. With the wishlist, the user can return later to your site and quickly resurrect those interesting products without having to search for them all over again. It would be possible to build a gift registry feature on top of this. The wish list could be the mode in which the original customer specifies the products he/she desires. Then additional code and database support could be added to track item purchase and user identity as the gift registry is fulfilled. This wouldn't be too hard to add on, but it's a feature we currently don't have.
3) We do have specific API on the ProductImpl class for generic attributes. In this way, you can utilize our Product class without any extension. However, if you prefer to extend our Product implementation and clearly define additional API that may better serve your business requirements, this is definitely possible. This extensibility is one of the great aspects of Broadleaf. However, looking at these features from the 1.1 admin GUI, we are definitely remiss. Our 1.0 - 1.1 admin was never full featured and we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to go in another direction. You'll see our longer term vision for the admin application with the 1.5 release, and many of the features that are missing (product attributes, etc...) in the current admin will finally be available.
4) We agree that from an SEO perspective, the product urls need some help. This is also on our 1.5 roadmap. You can see all the items that are part of 1.5 at this url:
http://www.broadleafcommerce.org/jira/s ... dmap-panel5) Facebook integration is minimal (really minimal). There's just a simple share tag that creates some share links. There's no admin support for this.
I think at the end of the day, your questions boil down to "How do I create a Broadleaf store and effectively maintain it using the admin?". The best answer for this is to use the core 1.1 Broadleaf libraries and ignore the 1.1 admin for now until 1.5 is ready (there should be a milestone release of 1.5 that will contain the admin functionality in the April 2011 timeframe). The core API will change very little between 1.1 and 1.5, so migration of dependent code and database tables will be minimal. We will be providing a migration document that will specifically target the areas that changed. As for setting up a store, the key facets are establishing any additional specificity in the domain to support your business and creating your customer facing presentation layer that talks to the Broadleaf engine.
As for documentation, this is an ongoing effort for us. In regard to documenting a presentation layer approach, we are largely agnostic to the presentation layer technology used, so it's hard to get very specific there. However, we could definitely add some docs that cover the core Broadleaf API that is important to the presentation layer. As for documentation for setting up Spring, your domain, configuring payment, taxes, etc... - these are all decently covered in the existing documentation:
http://www.broadleafcommerce.org/conflu ... nvironmenthttp://www.broadleafcommerce.org/conflu ... ctionalityThere will also be a lot of new documentation coming out around the new admin. This will include coverage of the out-of-the-box interface as well as developer documentation for configuration and extending/overriding/adding functionality.
Thanks for your inquiry and let me know if I can answer any other questions.