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Written by: Max Milbers

Category: Latest News

Published: 09 July 2013

Hits: 100328

After more than 5000 downloads of our test releases and approximately 400 participating testers we are proud to announce the Gold version of the vm2.0.x series.
Endless forum threads were read and answered. Many ideas were taken and went into the core. Hundreds of community users helped the team with their feedback, thank you for your participation.

Download at dev.virtuemart.net com_virtuemart.2.0.22a_extract_first.targz.zip or com_virtuemart.2.0.22a_extract_first.zip

Still 2.0.x?

This version 2.0.22 already has many features which were written in autumn 2012 for the next major version 2.2. To keep updating easy, we decided to add as many features as possible from vm2.2 into vm2.0 series without breaking the APi. The next step for vm2.2 will be updating some extensions, caused by the changed API. It is in our interest that templates have a long lifetime.

Powered by PHP-Storm

The VirtueMart project is now powered by Phpstorm, which is for us the best PHP IDE. Using this tool the code has been cleaned up again.
Some hash based caches improve the performance. Split language files reduce the consumed RAM noticeably. This means you can have more users parallel visiting your store.

AvaTax included

We are proud to announce the newest certification with Avalara, VirtueMart 2 now has a native solution integrated for a fully automated sales tax compliance for North America and beyond.
AvaTax Calc integrates with Virtuemart to deliver real-time sales tax calculations based on up-to-date sales and use tax rules. This includes sourcing rules, product taxability and jurisdiction assignment. Increased audit activity by taxing authorities demands businesses prove sales tax compliance through accurate calculations and reporting. AvaTax Calc makes compliance simple, with transaction history and on-demand reporting.
Avalara's sales tax rates Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering is more than just a calculator for sales tax rates. AvaTax Calc is an easily integrated, dynamic tax decision engine. AvaTax dramatically improves accuracy because at initial calculation, AvaTax Calc:

• Validates and corrects the address—including ZIP code +4
• Identifies product taxability
• Applies the most current, up-to-date tax rules and regulations
• Verifies tax holiday status
• Applies sourcing rules (where taxable)
• Automatically assigns correct jurisdiction

THEN the service provides sales tax calculation for the transaction—all in real-time with no delay or interruption to workflow—and applies it in your billing system.

 

Roadmap:

For the vm2.2 we plan
- joomla 3.x compatible
- native joomla ACL
- enhanced customfields, in special also the plugins
- enhanced shopperfields (for cart)
- enhanced cart helper

Fixes:
- Security:
a) fixed, that registered could unreveal orders of anonymous shoppers
b) fixed, that unpublished catgories could be accessed via direct link.
- Vm2 two times in the same database with different prefixes should work now
- product->created_on became sometimes 0 =>fixes "New products"
- fixed canonical links
- removed that it takes only 5 products per run in migration
- fixed for neighboured products for some sortings
- Bug fixes for clone products.
a) product prices wasn't clone
b) after cloning the product shopper group was wrong
- pagination settings. Please review after updating your pagination sequences
- various W3C compliance
- error in the calculator and calculation of rules per bill with categories. An index was used in two different foreach loops.
- fixed images of related products
- FE product editing
- various html fixes
- store priceWithoutTax on DB, changes revenue report net price calculation. Be aware that you must execute for this the "migration" task in the revenue view.
- customfield prices use now the currency of the selected price
- Search plugin: query includes the shopper group
- deleting of category let references left

Administration:
- drag n drop ordering for products by StephanBais
- Added an option to use fancy or facebox.
- configuration for orderstatus and emails to be sent
- order editing, Thanks to Ondrej and Maik
a) address data
b) items
- delivery notes creation for orders, Thanks to Reinhold
- configuration of header and footer for invoices, delivery notes, etc, Thanks to Reinhold
- mediahandler, search enhanced and pagination works
- new filter for roles in media view
- changed behaviour of media thumbs, the path/url is not stored unless it is an overwrite
- added resetThumbs to delete all entries and thumbs to adjust to new pattern or changed thumbnail size
- More sorting options
- Help button in every backend view, showing the online information of docs.virtuemart.net
- Product with price= 0 can be added to cart. There is also a new parameter for standard payment to no invoice on order total=0
- Added to paypal refunded
- Paypal email http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=114514.0
- Paypal : force UTF-8 encoding
- Shopperfields use default value now, so you can use it for setting the value default on "agree to tos".
- removed &: from links
- little change in migrator, should help if you have a slow machine and a lot products
- Added two migration scripts from the forum for vm1 product attributes and related products
- Add shipment and payment methods to sample data
- More tooltips, enhanced GUI.

Frontend:
-Fancybox
a) Added option to show related products in the "add to cart popup"
b) "add to cart popup" is template able
- Added the nice chosen.js to most FE dropdowns
- emails send in the shoppers language
- splitted language files
a) shopperfield language in FE/xx-YY.com_virtuemart_shoppers.ini
b) order language in FE/xx-YY/en-GB.com_virtuemart_orders.ini
c) => Most shops run with the fallback for english, so it is loading most time at least 2 languages. Cleaning and reducing the size of the language files gave us around 4 MB Ram.
- Please accept tos is directly displayed, less redirects
- added Meta for homepage
- Consistent display of discounted and old prices with line-through on product, homepage, cart, order, email and print view.
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=116607.0

Optimisation:
- function getProduct and getProductSingle are cached on hash keys based on the parameters
- removed unecessary getProduct function in cart
- neighboured products only loaded, if activated
- some code sniffing stuff. Just removed some warnings, made some functions to static, ...
- replaced, removed $this->loadHelper('image') by if class exists ...
- more JText::_ is used for example for "product availability"

For templaters:
- Fixed country state list for shipto,.. is now usuable two times on the screen (easier cart checkout).
- added quantity to product, so that it can be used easier in the cart popup
- added to the helper VirtueMartCart the functions blockConfirm and setRedirectDisabled for ajax based one page checkouts.
- Added function setCartPricesMerge(), makes it easier to change single prices, without touching the whole array.

Details

Written by: Max Milbers

Category: Latest News

Published: 13 March 2013

Hits: 39381

Relaunch of VirtueMart Portal

Reading this page, you will notice VirtueMart.net has a new look, new structure and new feel, which we started talking about this 3 years ago, so why has it taken so long? We had to wait until we were able to migrate everything to joomla 2.5 (Livesites, Links, Comments,...), which was a major job we have finally completed. We are proud that we have finally managed to present the new site; the design offers you more active areas, more links to specific information and easier navigation.

So many people added so many useful and helpful enhancements or features

Due the time it has taken us on relaunching the Virtuemart website, we were not able to finish vm2.1 as we would have liked, so we have released a new version of vm2.0, with many of the features we thought would be part of VM2.1. This was done because so many people added useful and helpful enhancements or features (like manufacturer depending rules), so it would have been a waste not to share these features as early as possible.

Slight philosophy step change for VM2.1

We have slightly changed our philosophy for the release of vm2.1, the idea was to release the version with a whole host of new features, but instead we have added some of these enhancements and features to 2.0.

The idea behind this was that we wanted to release it in a way that would allow us to get the newest features to you as quickly as possible, whilst in the background, 3^rd party developers can have enough time to play with VM2.1 and adjust their products, which helps to reduce the impact on both the 3^rd party extension developers and users alike. In short, VM2.1 plugins and extensions will be fully compatible with VM2.1 when it is released.

Conclusion

The newest release VM2.0 is ready for download, the new website, which we mentioned was a culmination of months of work is now live, and VM2.1 sitting on the edge being tested by the core developers, so all is looking good for the future.

Furthermore, we fixed smaller bugs.

The Future

Please read our roadmap

http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki/Roadmap.

The update should be completely backward compatible, but there is a new setting for the email sender which you should be aware of.

Changes from 2.0.18a - 2.0.18b (14. February)

- Added calculation per category for rules per cart

- Added correct reducing of tax when a discount is used and different VAT taxes are required for the products (Thanks to Maik Künnemann)

- Email subject price displayed in the correct currency

- Fixed - displaying several times payment/shipment methods when a shopper is in several shopper group-

-  Moved TOS to top of check in cart, for easier use and visibility.

- Added – when shipment and tax use generic rules, if only one product VAT is used

- Added – Improved step order levels by Székely Dénes (Thank you)

- AvaTax

Changes from 2.0.18b - 2.0.18c (1. March)

- Fix - cart rules per category by kkmediaproduction (Maik Künnemann) and Max.

- Added ordering for child products

- Added manufacturer for rules per product, thanks to <mediaDESIGN> St.Kraft, please be aware, this won’t work for rules per bill despite the categories.

- RSS feed for homepage and categories

- Bug fix – when admin changed some addresses of users, the bug caused (on some occasions) the loss of the logged in admins own address, if the user was not a VM user already.

- Taxes for shipment selection in view.html.php

- Fixed - step_order_level by Székely Dénes was not working with old overwrites, compatibility enhanced

- New option for Avalara, option to disable taxes if it is not the cart.

- Avalara caching

- Aavalara added purchase order number

Changes from 2.0.18c - 2.0.20a (13. March)

- added unified way of tcpdf , thanks Reinhold Kainhofer

- updated tcpdf

- removed fixed width in emails

- fix for unknown mathop

- RSS feed topten

- Multilingual images (different images for each language)

- added use vendor email address to the shopconfig, so you can activate the stan fix or not

- jquery.validationEngine-xx.js loaded by language

- increased size of userfield names to avoid problems with tooo long language keys

- fixed the problem that childs using price of parent had no prices in the cart

- Added checks if invoice folder is writeable

More information please visit http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=113785.0

Download VirtueMart2.0.20a targz

Download VirtueMart2.0.20a zip

Details

Written by: Max Milbers

Category: Latest News

Published: 20 December 2012

Hits: 37056

Happy Birthday VirtueMart 2

Our gift is 2.0.16

Hello people. Almost exactly one year ago we released VirtueMart 2.0.0. if you take a close look the news from the 19.12.11 - 23:52, with the final uploaded on 20.12.11, this was just 12 months ago.

VirtueMart 2 had a quite rough start, taking a look back we released maybe too early, however this was due to many users pushing us to release. Vm2.1 is already in the pipe and will be ready for testing mid-January, so this is the last of the VirtueMart 2.0.x series.

The newest Virtuemart 2

com_virtuemart.2.0.16_extract_first.targz.zip
or
com_virtuemart.2.0.16_extract_first.zip

 

The past 12 months:

We had to solve a lot of different problems last year and not only in the code, we wanted to revive a language based virtuemart 2 community, so worked continually in the background to achieve this, we travelled to conferences and gave free workshops, showing many people how easy VM2 is to use, whilst preparing the re launch of the virtuemart.net website, created a new template and layout, added a new board in the forum for 3rd party developers. We are now almost ready to port all extensions from oldextensions.virtuemart.net to extensions.virtuemart.net and have started to invite more and more of the many extension developers, but we want to ensure we also review all components, and this takes time, so all in all it has been a pretty busy year.

The forums:

In the past few days, I trawled through the forums and was surprised to see most threads have been answered by moderators or passionate users, but that some threads got completely ignored. I 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.

VirtueMart the project:

VirtueMart is a project, and over the past few weeks 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%.

Small insight into the future:

We wanted to release vm2.1 now, which offers a new structured customfields, which has resulted is massive speed gains by the rewritten customfields, and should include multiple prices, editable orders, more userfields, variation of fonts for pdf’s, and a whole lot more. The multiple price features was almost done already for 2.0.14, so we decided to release a fast 2.0.16 for the people who require multiprice.

Before any release we check the forum, and discovered a lot (20+) of patches and good bug reports, many thanks for these, and they are now all integrated into vm2.0.16, additionally, we have added a lot of speed optimisations.

We hope you enjoy 2.0.16 a product the community helped craft by ironing out bugs and fixes and we have already started on many features and ideas for the next series.

List of bug fixes and features in the forum Topic: Updated: Release 2.0.16 Final

 

Details

Written by: Max Milbers

Category: Latest News

Published: 26 November 2012

Hits: 38575

Dear international User, this is a news for german speakers. The topic is just about the changes of the german virtuemart page.

Wie vielleicht einige bereits bemerkt haben, verweisst die virtuemart.de adresse auf die alte Seite von Media-service-essen.de. Die Vereinsseite ist weiterhin unter verein.virtuemart.de erreichbar. Der Grund für diese Änderung ist, dass der Verein und die Seite hauptsächlich von Sören Eberhard-Biermann verwaltet worden sind und es nicht möglich war adäquaten Ersatz zu finden. Allerdings wurden wir mehr und mehr auf Michael Schulzes Seite aufmerksam. Sie hat das best besuchte deutschsprachige Virtuemart Forum, alle News waren immer übersetzt, Erweiterungen werden vorgestellt. Also hat Michael das letzte Jahr viel der Arbeit getan, welche der Verein hätte leiten sollen. Da mehr und mehr Leute in Deutschland auf mich zu kamen und meinten Virtuemart wäre tot, weil sich ja auf virtuemart.de nichts mehr tut, war es an der Zeit dies zu ändern. Insbesondere wurde auch von vielen deutschsprachigen Usern der Mangel an einem spezialisierten Forum und einer gutgeführten Community Seite angebracht. Wir sind uns sehr sicher das Michael ein guter Verwalter für die Seite virtuemart.de ist und er einen ausgezeichnetes Relaunch der Seite durchgeführt hat.

Warum nicht auf virtuemart.net? Die offiziellen Seiten benötigen schon 5 Server. Würden wir alle Community seiten betreuen bräuchten wir mindestens 20 server. Zudem können wir den verschiedenen Eigenheiten der Länder mit unserer Organisationsgröße nicht gerecht werden. Wir können niemals für alle Länder so guten Support liefern, wie im Land ansässige Spezialisten. Daher ist das Ziel, daß jedes Land bzw eigene Sprache eine eigene Community Seite unterhält. VirtueMart ist organisch, nicht monolithisch.

Ein Blog Eintrag von Michael virtuemart-de-hat-neues-zuhause