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- Written by: Max Milbers
- Category: Latest News
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Good news. The new VirtueMart store of the virtuemart core team is now opened and using the official address extensions.virtuemart.net. This store uses multivendor to give 3rd party developers an easy possibility to sell their extensions for virtuemart. The idea is that the core team can be payed to ensure the ongoing development and enhancing of the virtuemart core. Maybe we can later offer also support hours, books, hosting and others. When you want to support the project, but you dont have time to contribute, then buy something in the store to support us.
But what happened now with the VMED? At the moment the VMED is displayed in the shop http://extensions.virtuemart.net/component/sobi2 . It is not completly consistent yet. Either the shop will also provide free downloads as a kind of editors pick, or the shop is evoluting more and more to the new VMED for VM2.
What else is going on. A professional writer started to write a manual for our wiki dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki.
We have a new section in the forum for 3rd party developers and their extensions for vm2 3rd party extension VM2. You can find there a free eway plugin, jcomments for virtuemart, a redirect plugin to keep old vm1 links (just some examples). More and more payment and shipment plugins are ready. Systempay is now also in the core and maintained by the team.
The development version 2.0.3E is very matured now. The use of child variants got strongly enhanced. You can calculate your costprice according to the final price. This are mainly enhancments in the gui, else we concentrate on the various small fixes. Here the link when you want to test it VM2.0.4-RC. Personally I would use now the latest 2.0.3E aka 2.0.4-RC :-)
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- Written by: Max Milbers, Valerie Isaksen, Patrick Kohl
- Category: Latest News
- Hits: 67709
The whole Team is happy to offer you the 2.0.2 Official Update, with new features, and improvements.
Some people said we released VirtueMart 2 too early and it was not a real final. Most programs are never final and so Virtuemart 2 is always under ongoing development. So what means final then?
It means that the code is not changing strong for extension developers and templaters.
There are already now a lot extensions available for VirtueMart 2 and it is steadily growing. The traffic on our page has increased and we are very happy to have a new provider cloudaccess.net as partner being able to handle the upcoming page load. With PayZen and Klarna we have two payment providers working directly together with the team. There exists also new solutions for VirtueMart 2 and mobile solutions. Our new partner for mobile solution is ivmstore.com. This allow us to work in the best conditions for you, to propose an always better online sales solution.
Link : Download VirtueMart 2.0.2
New features:
- New payment plugins: PayZen, and Authorize.Net
- Compatibility Joomla 2.5
- New billing system incorporated in core: after order payment confirmation, the invoice is sent directly to shopper with the mail
- PDF Librairy added in AIO
- New router file reusable by 3 party's developers
- Customisable Page titles per category and product
- Automatic child customfield product displayed in a the parent product as a dropdown list
- Media handles downloadables files (free download) and also files for sales
- Faster media synchronisation
- New triggers (plgVmOnAddToCart)
- Migrations of most of datas
- Vendor view added, extended with layout for tos, about and contact
- Legal Informations for vendors
Fixes, improvements, enhancements:
- Some j2.5 blockers
- New order numbers and invoice numbers
- One click checkout for registred user
- More multibyte handling
- Fixed slug generation
- Sef links
- Js fixes
- Template enhancements
- Fix for limit "all" in category
- New getModel method to avoid not reproduceable bugs
- Deletion of data, handling data
- Some performance tweaks
- Customisable positions for customfields in the productdetails
- Tooltip for filter in mediahandler
- Medias can be unpublished now
- Added register layout in user view
- Minors in shipment and payment methods fixes
- Corrected error that prevent other administrators in j1.7 to act as the mainvendo
- Fixed price override display for anonymous
- Fix for order list
- Calculation rules are stored in order
- Search query
- When installing the component com_virtuemart_aio, the configuration is not overwritten
- Ordering for payment/shipment method display in checkout fixed
- Fix stockupdate and other fixes in custom fields
- Non vendors now stored with vendorid= 0
- Custom fields are also cloned when cloning a product
- Enhanced account maintenance
- Facebox js fix, compatibility fix for jquery
...... some small enhancements, fixes and bugs mainly written in the forum.
Thanks all Virtuemart testers, users and developers for your support and help.
The VirtueMart 2 development team at the JoomlaDay France
This year, the Joomla Day France will be held from March 24 to 25, 2012 in Strasbourg. The VirtueMart development team will be there for a conference and to assist both new and experienced users. It is an great opportunity for us to meet the french speaking community.
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- Written by: Max Milbers, Patrick Kohl, Valérie Isaksen
- Category: Latest News
- Hits: 75706
Finally after 2 years of development, the VirtueMart team proudly releases the first stable version of the new VirtueMart 2 Core. More than 100 people were involved, 8500 posts were written and endless lines of skype chats were done to create this new
Free Open Source Online Shop Solution,
an extension for Joomla in GPL2.
VirtueMart 2.0.0 is compatible Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7.
A bunch of features are included, such as:
- Products with expandable custom fields
- Advanced Tax system
- True multi-currencies management
- Checkout process as registered user or as guest
- One click checkout or multi-page checkout
- Multilingual store as a native solution
- SSL checkout
Based on Joomla MVC framework with all its advantage:
- Template overwritting,
- Implementation of Joomla Plugins for: payment, shipment, coupons, calculation rules, custom product fields, ...
- Simple installation and integration of other joomla extensions.
More features are listed here: http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=91199.0
Perspective
The next months we will mainly concentrate on module and plugin development and supporting 3rd party developers. We will also update the wiki with a manual, and do workshops.
Credits
We thank the whole VirtueMart community. We all helped together to create a new fantastic solution. We thank in special Sören Eberhardt-Biermann who made this community possible and Kelvyn Sheppard our forum master and our most endurance tester Devendra Kumar Shukla.
Max Milbers, Patrick Kohl, Valérie Isaksen, Rick Glunt, Roland Dalmulder, Oscar van Eijk, Urs Brülhart, Devendra Kumar Shukla, Eugen Stranz, Alex Steiner, Jörg Kiekebusch, Christopher Roussel, John Acosta, George Kostopoulos, Zbigniew Mazur, Joe Motacek, John Wicks, Markus Öhler, Stephanie Schmidt, Vu Hoang Viet, Simon Hodgkiss, Mickaël Cabanas, Holbok Istvàn, Fred Bidon, Alexander Kludt, Akarawuth Tamrareang, Konstantin Dzvonik
and a lot different translators, supporters, and testers.
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- Written by: Valérie Isaksen
- Category: Latest News
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VirtueMart 2.00 RC3: better, faster and stronger
What is new in VirtueMart RC3?
- VirtueMart RC3 handles multi-lingual store as a native solution.
- The plugins implementation has been improved.
- Joomla cache has been introduced to speed up the code.
- The number of queries has been reduced.
When is the final?
During one month, several pre-releases for the RC3 have been submitted directly to the members in the forum to test the migration process from the RC2 M version to the RC3, the multi lingual capabilities and the new plugin system. This RC3 version is our last step before the final release. VirtueMart 2.0.0 will be released december, 19th .
Everybody having a store built with a RC2 version should first update their store with this RC3 version. In the final release VirtueMart 2.0.0, all the table migration process will be removed.
How to install the RC3 over a store running RC2 version?
- If possible, increase the "max_execution_time" time and the "memory_limit" parameters in your php.ini file, so that the migration / update script gets executed without timing out.
- Disable the Akeeba System - System Restore Points.
- Disable the Joomla debug option in the Joomla configuration.
- Uninstall the vmshipper plugin via the Joomla uninstall menu.
- Delete the file virtuemart.cfg placed in the administrator/components/com_virtuemart folder.
- Set your default joomla frontend language to the one used in the description of your products. It is important to do this step before updating VirtueMart, to install the correct default VirtueMart languages tables.
- Install the component VirtueMart. The code will be overwritten, and VirtueMart tables content will be migrate to the new tables.
- Install the AIO component. It contains all the plugins and the modules related to VirtueMart.
- Edit and store all your payment methods. All the new tables needed to handle the payment will be created.
- Because we have renamed the plugin vmshipper to vmshipment, you must reconfigure the shipment methods.
- Go to the administrator, set the language(s) for your store, even if your store is not multi ligual and save the VirtueMart configuration.
How to set up a multi-lingual store?
In addition to the standard Joomla installation, install all languages you would like to use in your multi-lingual store. Select them in the VirtueMart configuration.
Products, categories, manufacturers, shipment, and payment can be translated. All the fields must be stored in the default language. For the others languages , translate only the contents signaled by a flag.
Translators
Some new keys have been added, some languages strings have changed. Now the language files are stable. Please check them or complete them.
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- Written by: Max Milbers
- Category: Latest News
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Some people were annoyed that we do not update about the situation. The question is do we communicate or do we develop? Our style to develop needs already really a lot of communication, because we use rapid prototyping and pair programming technics. There is also a lot of communication in the forum. People who follow the vm2 forum a bit are updated. They can see the errors, questions and our answers.
They should also consider that we already released a version which is more or less treated by the development team as a final. That means we take care that people can smoothly update. For us it is important that beta testers can use their work for their final store. We also train the update processes itself. As I already wrote before I suggest to install vm2, try, test and learn it. Start to create your store, learn the possibilities. Then you can decide if VM2 is ready for your purposes. The virtuemart 2 core is now and later released as is without warranty. If it is a final or not.
There are also some people who are annoyed, because they trusted the published ETA and have now angry clients. This people are very rude. Not helping but shouting that it is too slow is just ... (speechless). It is really crazy that the team should feel guilty and is accused for something it never promised by people who did nothing for the virtuemart project .
The version M was quite final, so we tested to develop different plugins and run into trouble. The payment and shipment plugins do not belong to the core, but are essential for a shop, so releasing a core without a minimum amount of working plugins is useless. We noticed that the system can be simplified, which improves and helps with the plgugin development. Since we are not final, we combined the abstract plugin handler for shipment and payment plugins. Within 3 days we optimised the pluginsystem and enhanced it. This was a big shift and very good that we waited with the final release.
The next big shift is that we got unhappy with the multilanguages solution for j1.7, or better said, there is none and it will take time until there is any and the solutions in seight are not performant. We got the idea how to write a fast performant multilanguage system. Since we need that for the virtuemart store, we decided to write it and it seems that we needed 4 days for it. The result is a multilanguage system, which is even faster than before.
Since we changed 2 big systems, the plugin system and the language system, we must do another release. We call it Release Candidate 3.
Feature list: Integrated in joomla 1.5 and joomla 1.7 with its advantages (articles, blog, forum, ...)
- Uses joomla extensions
- User based shopsystem
- Template overrides (layouts, mails)
native multilanguage
- categories
- products
- manufactuers
- vendors
- seo
nested categories
- with meta tags for seo
- with description and media
shoppergroups
- pricing depending by shoppergroups
- price display depending by shoppergroups
- payment/shipment depending by shoppergroups
- anonymous shoppergroup
shopper
- customizable shopper input form
- input form depended on registration, checkout or shipment
- completly anonymous checkout
- Adressbook
- default Bill-to and Ship-to address
- default payment and shipment method
- check of eu vat id (not working yet)
products
- with meta tags for seo
- short and long description
- dimensions (weight, size)
- multiple media
- variants, attributes
- stockable variants
- unlimited child products and derivated levels
- product pattern (Parent product used as pattern for child products)
- related products
Inventory/Stocking
- stocking/inventory
- stock warning
- virtual stock (ordered but not finally bought)
Prices
- various type of prices to display depended by shoppergroup
- prices adjusted by shopper choosen currency
- different currency format per currency
real multi currency
- auto updating rates
- add your own currencies for fixed currency rates
manufacturer media handler
- atm finished for images, will be used for downloadables, videos, pdf, programs, ...
default SEF/SEO integrated Product reviews and ratings dynamical calculator
- discounts based on time, category, shoppergroup, country, and state
- tax based on time, category, shoppergroup, country, and state
- discounts, tax per product and/or order
- discounts, tax have their own currencies (for duties)
multiple payment and shippings options
- shipment payment methods are defined per vendor
checkout
- guest checkout; completly anonymous checkout
- option to register at begin of checkout
- cart is an object, competly overridable by template
- cart is stored in the session
- 1 click checkout
- multipage checkout
- one page checkout (not by default)
- SSL
order handling backend
- Payment/shipment workflow
- history
- modifiable
order handling frontend
- order tracking for anonymous users
revenue
- sortable
template handling
- different joomla templates by category
- different category browse pages per category
- different product display pages per category/product
product display configurable by
- latest
- topten (most sold)
- newest
- featured
- sortable
- searchable
marketing promotions and tools
- coupon handling
- recommend a product to friend link
other
- hidden debugging tool
