VirtueMart is a project powered by a very small team, but an ever growing community, and depends on people volunteering time, code, money, and energy to keep it going. This page will help you if you are interested in supporting the project in any way.
The best way to support the project is to:
Donating
VirtueMart itself is free of charge, but there are a lot of things that require a lot of money - like server hosting, developer software, developer wages and financing public meetings (like the VirtueMart or Joomla! conferences). We removed the donation option. Instead we offer now a membership model, which grants some advantages for you.
Support
VirtueMart would not be where it is today without having attracted a community where the philosophies are shared about the work involved. Everyone who has developed new features and updated work greatly benefits the project and community, and allows anyone to participate to have the next step taken in improving the work in ways not originally thought of.
The greatest success a project could ever have is to have a self supported community, where community members help each other out and welcome those new to the project who end up happily helping others out like themselves too. There are currently more than 300.000 registered members on our support forum, having written more than 250k posts and 60k topics!
Write Contributions!
Everyone who starts an online-shop with VirtueMart will sooner or later modify the code and enhance his shop somehow. Share your modifications! All users of VirtueMart need more
- payment modules
- shipping modules
- images (other than the default ones)
You can easily begin writing your own modifications after having read the Developer Manual (see Documentation).
We have a board dedicated to modifications, "hacks" and "tweaks" (Board Link), where you can post your code and additional files as an attachment.
Just share your code with others!
Documentation
Everyone can help with the documentation effort even if you know little about how certain features work. In fact, writing documentation about such tasks may be better accomplished by those who know little about it. You can post your small tutorials to the Forum or just send them to us via email.
We also have a small FAQ Section in the developer Wiki where everyone can contribute informaton.
You can also help with the User Manual and the Developer Manual -
- fill empty sections
- translate the documents into your language
- correct the documents
- check the documents if they are still recent
You can download the source of those documents, which are written in the DocBook XML format. Using the XMLMind XML Editor for WYSIWYG editing is recommended. To convert the DocBook sources to a usable output format like pdf / HTML / chm you can use eDe (Win) or XMLMind FO Converter (all OS).
Bug Fixing
Help speed up the development of the project by taking care of bug reports at the Feature & Bug Board.
Linking
Just like any other project, VirtueMart lives mostly through the attention of many active and passive fans. You can help increase the attention of our audience by leaving the "powered by VirtueMart" image on the shop front end which links to this site.
Live Shops
Share your online-shop with the rest of the world at the Live Shops section, which currently has more than 2000 entries and is growing each day!
You can easily add your Shop by registering at this site and following the link "Submit new Bookmark" on the Live Shops section.