Today is our 5th birthday!
It's a big goal for the whole team to keep live and running , for such a long time , an open source software, but for sure it's an even more particular event for the VirtueMart project founder, Soeren, who drops us a few lines about what once was a mambo script and in a few months will become a stable Joomla! 1.5 MVC component.
" It was in April 2004 when the first mambo-phpShop site went live: phpShop was the first completely working eCommerce solution directly integrated into Mambo
Just 1 year and 5 months later the Mambo team split up and Joomla! entered the CMS world.
For us it was time to get a new name! So we decided not to choose one that had not a trademarked word as part of it; we were searching for a positive word that was not in use yet - and VirtueMart was the one which got most of the votes in the mambo-phpShop team.
Now it's the 5th birthday and I'm very proud of what VirtueMart has become: the most important eCommerce software directly integrated into Joomla! "
Max , VirtueMart 1.5 branch project leader, for this day is giving us some insights regarding the new version, which has already passed an internal alpha stage
"I hoped to have a Beta of VM1.5 for this special day, but the summer holidays and our everyday job interfered with our plans. The problem is not the amount of work, the problem is that the teammembers do not have enough time, so just be patient or feel free to join the team :)
The new VirtueMart is fully Joomla! MVC compliant: backend is complete, what's next is the frontend.
Like the backend, it'll be completely re written, introducing advantages that will make VirtueMart more flexible.
Just think that the checkout process and the cart will work with Layouts and also system emails are generated by the Joomla! Layout pattern. So the work for building future virtuemart templates, for example, will be very easy.
Addons for VirtueMart can now work with a plugin system, which is an extensions of the joomla one."
We would like to say thank you to everybody who believe in us and who have helped the project during these years!