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Download VirtueMart now!
VirtueMart is a powerful free ecommerce component for Joomla!®. Easy to use for beginners and experts, it offers thousands of built in features to quickly install your professional store.
VirtueMart 4.0.x is the latest stable version available. It is compatible with Joomla! 3.10.x and Joomla! 4.2.x. The most recent version is in the extensions store
VirtueMart is an Open source project, and this packages are free for download
How to start
You are new to Joomla and VirtueMart or you don't have Joomla already installed? we recommend to download the Full installer:
- Unzip the downloaded archive
- Move the unzipped archive to your web folder
- Open your browser and enter the URL of you website
- The installation process starts. Follow the instructions.
You already have Joomla installed ? Buy a membership and download the VirtueMart package(Core, AIO and TCPDF) and it install it.
- If your server prevents uploading such a big file, unzip the downloaded archive
- Install the VirtueMart core component via the Joomla installer first (com_virtuemart.w.x.y.zip)
- Install the VirtueMart AIO component second. It contains VirtueMart plugins and modules (com_virtuemart_ext_aio.w.x.y.zip)
- Install the TCPDF component. It is necessary for printing invoices and delivery notes (com_tcpdf_1.x.y.zip)
- Install the admin template. (vmadmin_x.y.zip)
- Install the frontend template horme. (horme3.x.y.zip)
More detailed instructions can be found here: installation instructions.
You need more help? Visit our forum section about Installation, Migration & Upgrade VM 2.
Update by svn using this manual. how to update VirtueMart from SVN.
Features
VirtueMart includes natively a very important list of features such as:
- Complex product easily created
- Easy Store Management
- Powerful SEO features
- Marketing and promotions tools included
- Numerous payment providers integrated
Discover all the features, and try our demo.
Requirements
VirtueMart has the same requirements as joomla.
However, we recommend those technical options:
php 5.3+ and mysql5.5, php settings: 128 MB RAM (at least 64 MB for the pdf invoices).
Hosting
Hosting is an important part of the success of your business. VirtueMart has selected some hosts companies for their performance specialized in hosting VirtueMart shops:
More about A2 hosting
Sign Up Now with A2 hosting
More about Cloudaccess
Sign Up Now with Cloudaccess
More about Siteground.com
Sign Up Now with Siteground
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- Written by: Max Milbers
- Category: Uncategorised
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VirtueMart 2 offers an extensive list of features as standard to enable shop owners to build a working shopping cart, the non-exhaustive list is below:
Please note that you can extend your VirtueMart shop using Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules!
Don't forget to visit extensions.virtuemart.net for more a list of available extensions.
For Customers
Greeted by its native language, a customer directly feels welcome.
Nested categories help your customer to get a structure of the shop. Different templates and layouts per category can create various look and feel.
The advanced SEM/SEO due metatags for categories, products, manufacturers, and medias helps the customer to find the wares via search engines. Customers can pass sef links to friends and can easily find the right tab due the page titles. Even if they mistype a link or use an outdated link, they will get a nice fallback page (for example the regarding category) and the searchengines get the 404.
A short description gives a fast oversight while browsing the store. There is a long description available for the interested customer on a product details page.
Multiple media (images, pdfs, videos,...) give the customer a good oversight of the product.
Related categories, products show the customer directly other fitting products. This a very good extra service which helps your customer to buy a good set of items (for example a printer and the right toner for it) and increases the volume of the merchant.
The native review and rating system is enhancing the customer experience and gives them a guideline if the product is the right item for them.
Shoppergroups individualize the shopping experience. It can change the price display/format/calculation for them. For example the B2C customer sees the prices with tax, while the B2B customers sees the prices directly without tax. Or returning customers directly get a discount of 5%.
The view, in which the shopper is entering his data, can be easily adjusted to the cultur, national laws or just habits of the targeted audience. For example pure B2C shops can remove the "company" field, while others remove the "second name" field. A pizza service realised with virtuemart would remove the country/state field and enter already a city as default.
The multicurrency system allows to choose a desired currency with a format the shopper is used to. So the customer can faster decide if the product is in the desired price range.
The cart checkout allows to checkout with registration or without. Different templates and/or extensions allow a multipage checkout or one page checkout. The cart can be adjusted to the customers need. If the customers come mainly from a default country, it can be prefilled. This can be done also automatically by IP with an extension for a pocket money. The shipment and payment methods can have different conditions, so that a customer sees only methods that are available for him (by weight, zip, country, currency, payment amount, shoppergroup and so on).
Returning customers can of course reuse their address. They can also send a product and use as shipment address.
Orders are always trackable, regardless registration.
Different groups of products like "latest", "topten", "newest", "featured" give a fast impression and guide the customer to the best offers in the store. All lists are sortable and searchable. Customers can search for products by a certain category, manufacturer, attribute and of course descriptions.
Customers like to feel important using a coupon or similar marketing tools
For Merchants
VirtueMart offers you nested categories as many as your hardware can support. Products can have multiple categories, so your customers can find your products among different topics. Products can also have unpublished categories for calculation rules.
There are plenty of SEM technics already onboard. Metatags, keys, follow policies, customised page title and so on for categories, products, manufacturers, and medias. Even if there are many valid links for just one product, the canonical URL tells search engines the right one. Encrease your ranking position by combining meta settings with your product description, media description and manufacturer content. Different media types like video, audio, e-books, give your customers good information and a nice preview and additionally enhance your rating by search engines.
All shoppers are in shoppergroups. There exists shoppergroups for not logged in users and even they can be pushed in shoppergroups. Almost anything is depending on shoppergroups and they give you a lot controll. Shoppergroups allows you to create customised discounts, price display, payment/shipment methods and similar. You have B2B and B2C customers? Not a big deal with shoppergroups. You want to give good customers a discount? Add them to a shoppergroup. You dont want to deal with shoppergroups? Then just use the preconfigured defaults.
VirtueMart allows you easily to adjust the shopper input form to your cultur, legal requirements or habits of your shoppers.
There is an inventory with stock warning and a virtual stock (ordered but not finally bought)
The product edit allows you to set different attributes, which are used in the shop logic, like
- multiple prices depending on currency, shoppergroup, amount, etc
- product dimensions (weight, size)
- custom attributes
There are some technics to improve the product editing like product patterns, they allow you to change an attribute for your derivated products within minutes. Product cloning and derivating allows you to create fast a bunch of similar products. Related products help to push your shoppers to fitting products. They are displayed on the product detail view and the add to cart popup.
Custom attributes allow you to add unified descriptions (searchable) for example the author or functions to your product like dropdowns for a selection, or for a text by the shopper. It can be easily extended with extra plugins and can be used for downloads, uploads, meterware,..
The unified calculator does all the discount, tax and currency handling. It is rule based and works with different conditions for applying a rule. You can define as rules profit margin, discounts, tax, vattax. Every rule can have its own currency, with automatically updated rates. Just configure the rules and it directly calculates the correct taxes. Even if you have different vat taxes in the cart and cartwide discount. You can use as conditions:
- categories
- shoppergroups
- time/date
- delivery address
- manufacturer
- extendable by Plugins (complete takeover by dynamical services like Avatax, or by quantity)
The shipment and payment is done by plugins. A lot of them already delivered by the All-in-once installer and they are easy to install by mouseclick. If you miss one, take a look on our store or the JED to find yours. There also a plenty of conditions to create a fine grained system to offer your customers directly the best fitting shipment/payment.
Payments use
-
Minimal amount / maximal amount to use a payment
-
Transaction fees
-
By countries
-
By shopper groups
-
Paypal, Klarna, Sofort Banking, Skrill, and Cash on delivery included
Shipments use
- By shopper groups
- By countries
- Based on weight, zip, countries, number of articles, order amount
VirtueMart does the invoice handling for you. You can define at which order status the invoice should be created (depends on your accounting). The history of the orderstatus is logged. You can also modify it to adjust the order to a customer request. You can also use the invoice system for custom jobs.
Use the advantages of the joomla ACL (Rightsmanagment) to define the visibility and editing rights of your employees.
Use the multilanguage features to expand your business globaly. The new language fallback system reliefs you from providing a translation for any product, just market your best.
For Webagencies
Virtuemart 2 is a joomla component and takes full advantage of its framework. Joomla is a very widespread and stable CMS and framework for php components. Around a quarter of all government pages run with joomla which demonstrate its power.
Joomla provides already a system to install and update new components. It provides already a template, module and plugin system. These can be combined with VirtueMart. For example VirtueMart descriptions can use joomla content plugins to display videos for example. The languages can be easily adjusted due mouseclicks within joomla. New templates can be installed within a few mouseclicks and can then use overrides to adjust the shop appearance perfectly to the need of any customer. The module system provides blocks with dynamical filled information, which can be attached to different positions within a joomla template. The joomla ecosystem is very big and provides webmasters with free or cheap tools for their page. Backup, Securing, data analytic systems,... http://extensions.joomla.org/
The big and international VirtueMart community provides you with a lot information, documentation (docs.virtuemart.net), tutorials, tips and tricks. Visit our forum to read about solutions provided by community members. Join us here forum.virtuemart.net
SEM
Search engine marketing is a very important field for any shop. VM2 provides for any entity own metatags, category, product, manufacturer, media, mainpage. Any page can have its own dynamic generated page title or a customised one. The SEF link system of VirtueMart is fallback safe, for example if a product is not found the customer is redirected to the related category and a message is displayed. Search engines see a 404. We have a similar system for products in multiple categories.
VM2 is very resource-conserving and can handle easily thousands of products on a shared host. There are no artificial limits in VirtueMart. You just need a joomla prepared hoster for a pocket money to prepare and run the shop. Of course the more customer browsing the store the more ressources are needed. Even bigger shops are running well with an average vserver.
The debugging tools in joomla and virtuemart allows you to debug a live store without knowing by the customer
For Developers
We are a community of developers. If you are looking for documentation, please read here (dev.virtuemar.net/wiki). Join the forum to help us to push the project forward, find helping code snippetes, provide bug reports, so that we can constantly enhance the core.
VirtueMart provides in combination with joomla an open architecture. The extension system allows it to modify the store deeply without touching the core. The overridable template system of joomla provides a simple method to customise the css and layouts of any view.
The pluginsystem allows you to extend the shopperfields, the product details and the calculation rules. You can also create new shipment and payment plugins. In case you wrote a nice extension you can sell it directly at extensions.virtuemart.net.
Our extension store gives you the possibility to sell your products without having your own shop. Feel welcome in our subboard for 3rd party developer and present your product directly in the community.
abstract
VirtueMart 2 features
VirtueMart 2 offers an extensive list of features as standard to enable shop owners to build a working shopping cart, the non-exhaustive list is below:
Please note that you can extend your VirtueMart shop using Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules!
Don't forget to visit extensions.virtuemart.net for more a list of available extensions.
Based on Joomla MVC framework with all its advantage:
- Template overriding,
- Implementation of Joomla Plugins for: payment, shipment, coupons, calculation rules, custom product fields, ...
- Simple installation and integration of other joomla extensions.
CATEGORIES
- Nested categories
- With meta tags for seo
- With description and media
PRODUCTS
- With meta tags for seo
- Short and long description
- Dimensions (weight, size)
- Multiple media
- Variants, attributes
- Unlimited child products and derivated levels
- Product pattern (Parent product used as pattern for child products)
- Related products
- Reviews and ratings
SHOPPERGROUPS
- Pricing depending by shoppergroups
- Price display depending by shoppergroups
- Payment/shipment depending by shoppergroups
SHOPPERS
- Customizable shopper input form
- Input form depended on registration, checkout or shipment
- Completely anonymous checkout
- Addressbook
- Default Bill-to and Ship-to address
- Default payment and shipment method
INVENTORY/STOCK
- 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 chosen currency
- Different currency format per currency
REAL MULTI CURRENCY
- Auto updating rates
- Add your own currencies for fixed currency rates
SEF/SEO
- Default SEF/SEO integrated
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)
PAYMENT
- Based on plugins
- Minimal amount / maximal amount to use a payment
- Transaction fees
- By countries
- By shopper groups
- Paypal, SystemPay, Payzen, Klarna, Cash on delivery included
SHIPMENT
- Based on plugins
- By shopper groups
- By countries
- Based on weight, zip, countries, number of articles, order amount
CHECKOUT
- Guest checkout; completely 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
ORDERS
- Payment/shipment workflow
- History
- Modifiable
- Order tracking for anonymous users
PRODUCTS DISPLAY
- Latest
- Top Ten (most sold)
- Newest
- Featured
- Sortable
- Searchable
MULTILINGUAL
- Native with joomla 2.5
- With extra joomla components (joomfish) for joomla 1.5
MARKETING PROMOTION AND TOOLS
- Coupon handling
- Recommend a product to friend link
OTHER
- Hidden debugging tool
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- Written by: Valérie Isaksen
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Since 26th May 2012, All websites across the EU are now required to ask your permission to place cookies on your machine (E-Privacy Directive 2009/136/EC).
The EU Cookie Directive is designed to increase consumer protection. It recognizes the importance and usefulness of cookies for the functioning of a web site but requires websites to obtain informed consent from visitors before they store information on a computer or any web connected device.
This is storage is mostly done by cookies, which can then be used for tracking visitors to a site. We only use it within the EU law. You can choose whether or not to allow the site to use cookies in this way, but you should be aware that if you do not allow cookies you may experience a loss of site functionality in many cases, and some services will not work at all unless cookies are allowed.
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Read more: DIRECTIVE 2009/136/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL
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VirtueMart is a project
VirtueMart is a project. Everyone is invited to be part of the project. The goal of the project is to provide the best free ecommerce solution, which is competitive to all other ecommerce solutions. The real goal behind this is to create a better world. We egalize possibilities. This does not not mean that we can help everyone for free. We provide the base environment everyone for free, what you can do with it depends only on you.
Being part of the project
Often we are asked how to join the project. It is more like a scene than a club. When you wanna join, just read, join the conversation, talk with us in the forum. Provide snippets, help other people, ask constructive questions. Being part of the virtuemart community is not possesing any membership like joining the local dog club. Joining the virtuemart community means to join us, the people behind it. Sometimes we read that the virtuemart project is not transparent, we use no roadmap, no tracker. Yes on the first view this right, on the second view the reason behind all this is that we try to minimize the waterhead coming due organisation of such an amount of people. Isnt that more a reason for a tracker or a roadmap? In fact we have a kind of tracker, and we have a roadmap. The idea behind of it is a system using priorities. We noticed that the priorities are changing faster than you can write them down. People being part of the community know the tracker (our forum) and they know where to find our roadmaps (forum, news).
When you want to join the team and to be listed on dev.virtuemart.net, then the work in the forum is almost for everyone a duty. People helping in the forum are usually invited by us directly. If you feel ignored, write a private message to Milbo (Max Milbers).
The forums
Most threads are been answered by moderators or passionate users, but sometimes it happens that some threads got completely ignored. We have thought about how this happens and have asked our moderators to find ways to prevent it. We feel the reasons are quite simple, the core developers (Valerie and Max) should not spend their time checking the forum, because we need this time to develop the core, of course we take a look every 1-2 days, but some days a thread is pushed on the second page within hours, because of the volume of active people.
The core developers and supporters are mostly Europeans and so it can be very likely that we just don’t see them as often as users need, however many of the answers have been supplied by the community.
Over the past an amazing number of patches have been created by the community (GREAT WORK thank you), so if there is a thread in the forum that’s regularly updated, moderators just assume that people find a solution themselves, whilst other moderators think that code snippets are professional talk. Another misconception and one of the biggest problems, is that people often claim they have bugs, when this is merely a product of misconfiguration, and on the other side of the coin, we think it is just a misconfiguration, when in fact it is a bug or missing feature. This is a confusion we are trying to address. But in majority the community has helped us to create the great product VirtueMart 2, which has evolved into and one we are proud to use.
So in conclusion
So in conclusion, many people have helped, the speed of growth with development and patches has been astounding, with slight cracks appearing in the way people perceive the forum, a perception that we ignore posts, or avoid answering, but this is not a case of ignoring anyone, or any thread, if there is a live thread and the team seems to ignore it, remind yourself, the team never ignores something on purpose, just write a short pm (without swearing if possible) to me. We believe Vm2 is more flexible and mightier than vm1, so most people can get a shop working using only 30% of the features and everyone uses different 30%.
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You can create some beautiful content by using some simple HTML elements. The Warp theme framework offers some neat styles for all HTML elements and a great set of CSS classes to style your content. Basic HTML is very easy to learn and this small guide shows you how to use all styles provided by the Warp framework.
Basic HTML Elements
Here is a short demonstration of text-level semanticts. The <p> element creates a new paragraph. It will have some space before and after itself. To turn your text into hypertext just use the <a> element.
Text-Level Semantics
You can emphasize text using the <em> element or to imply any extra importance the <strong> element. Highlight text with no semantic meaning using the <mark> element. Markup document changes like inserted or deleted text with the <del> element or <ins> element. To define an abbreviation use the <abbr> element and to define a definition term use the <dfn> element.
Short List with Links
- YOOtheme - Premium Joomla Templates and WordPress Themes
- Warp Framework - Fast and Slick Theme Framework
- ZOO - Content Application Builder
- Stock Icons - For Web and Print Projects
Quotations and Code
Inline quotations can be defined by using the <q> element
.
The <blockquote> element defines a long quotation which also creates a new block by inserting white space before and after the blockquote element.
To define a short inline computer code use the <code> element. For a larger code snippet use the <pre> element which defines preformatted text. It creates a new text block which preserves both spaces and line breaks.
pre {
margin: 15px 0;
padding: 10px;
font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 18px;
white-space: pre-wrap;
}
Use the <small> element for side comments and small print.
Useful CSS Classes
Here is a short demonstration of all style related CSS classes provided by the Warp framework.
Highlight Content
Drop caps are the first letter of a paragraph which are displayed bigger than the rest of the text. You can create a drop cap using the CSS class dropcap. To emphasize text with some small boxes use <em> element with the CSS class box.
box-content.box-note.box-info.box-warning.box-hint.box-download.Use the CSS class dotted to create a dotted horizontal rule.
Tables
Create a zebra stripped table using using the CSS class zebra.
| Table Heading | Table Heading | Table Heading |
|---|---|---|
| Table Footer | Table Footer | Table Footer |
| Table Data | Table Data | Data Centered |
| Data Bold | Table Data | Data Centered |
| Table Data | Table Data | Data Centered |
Definition Lists
Create a nice looking definition list separated with a line by using the CSS class separator.
- Definition List
- A definition list is a list of terms and corresponding definitions. To create a definition list use the <dl> element in conjunction with <dt> to define the definition term and <dd> to define the definition description.
- Definition Term
- This is a definition description.
- Definition Term
- This is a definition description.
- This is another definition description.
Forms
Create a clearly arranged form layout with fieldset boxes using the CSS class box.