The following blog post is for VirtueMart 1.1 templates. I did a new blog post with a list of templates for VirtueMart 2!

You are looking for a great and innovative Joomla! template for your new webstore? Good that you're here! You will be surprised (at least I was) how many templates for VirtueMart-based sites you can find nowadays. The following blog post will list some of the template vendors with a short description.

As you might have noticed yesterday, the Forum (and Developer Portal) Server was down from time to time. It was my first day at work after the holidays, so I didn't monitor the server personally. When I attempted to restart CodeBeamer (the great software used for dev.virtuemart.net), it always crashed with a segmentation fault. That error is a good indicator for faulty RAM, so I checked it using memtester. The result clearly showed that the RAM contained bad adresses, so I contacted the Server4you Support team, who quickly replaced the RAM (on the 10 months old server!). So good to know that we can rely on their support...

Now that VirtueMart 1.1.2 has been released, the VirtueMart team can focus again on the future direction of VirtueMart. In keeping with the VirtueMart road map, we have created separate branches in the SVN repository for the different VirtueMart versions:

VirtueMart 1.1

/branches/virtuemart-1.1 This is the current stable version of VirtueMart. Maintenance releases will be managed here as they are needed.

VirtueMart 1.2

/branches/virtuemart-1.2 This will become the next minor release of VirtueMart containing many new features. VirtueMart 1.2 will maintain compatibility with Joomla! 1.0, Mambo 4.5/4.6, and Joomla! 1.5. PHP 4 will still be supported in VirtueMart 1.2.

VirtueMart 2.0

/trunk This will become the next major release of VirtueMart. VirtueMart 2.0 will only be compatible with Joomla! 1.5 or higher and will only support PHP 5. VirtueMart 2.0 will make extensive use of the Joomla! framework and will provide an extensible architecture to better support third party developers.

Be sure to update your SVN repository paths.

Although it hasn't much to do with VirtueMart, I thought I should write about it, because eXtplorer is a valuable tool for so many of you (for me too, I created it, because I needed someting like it!). This software has now been released in version 2.0 (stable) after most of those annyoing bugs have been ironed out.

eXtplorer is a web-based file manager, that allows you to access and work with files directly on your web server. It installs on Joomla! 1.0.x, 1.5.x simply by using the component installer, but it can also be used as a standalone-app. A short word on joomlaXplorer: Although it's still available, I don't develop for it anymore (except for security fixes). eXtplorer is the replacement for joomlaXplorer.

Make sure to check it out:

• Project on joomlacode.org
• Project Homepage.