Welcome to Building E-commerce Sites with VirtueMart Cookbook. The next few pages will help you decide if Joomla!, VirtueMart, and this book can help you succeed with your latest online store or client. If you are a seasoned VirtueMart pro, you can skip a couple of paragraphs and jump to the section Who this book is for because you probably already realize the potential. But if you are a relative newcomer to Joomla!, VirtueMart or e-commerce, then you have a big opportunity and I urge you to find out more.
Joomla! is huge. I was browsing their forums the other day and I noticed they now have over 600,000 members. According to their own statistics they now have 35 million core downloads and thousands of different extensions. It would be a fairly awkward argument to not agree that Joomla! is the foremost, one of the best-featured, and one of the most extendable CMS there is!
In the recent past however there has been criticism of the Joomla! e-commerce options. It is still true that the e-commerce options are far from perfect. But now with the latest version of VirtueMart, alongside a growing list of high-quality extensions and a vast array of other Joomla!/e-commerce options to fill the occasional VirtueMart void; Joomla! users and developers are faced with a huge opportunity! To offer the best CMS bar none, integrated with just about any e-commerce feature imaginable. Oh, and most of it is free!
Exploring this opportunity is the purpose of the recipes in this book.
Chapter 1, Setting Up Shop covers the installation of Joomla! and VirtueMart as well as the configuration of the basic and essential options.
Chapter 2, Merchandising VirtueMart introduces the addition of our products and product categories as well as some advanced features via VirtueMart's custom fields.
Chapter 3, Shipping and Taxes covers how to offer efficient and easy-to understand shipping and tax options to suit a number of different scenarios, the day our store can be unleashed on the public.
Chapter 4, Making Your Store Look Amazing explains some of the template options available in Joomla!/VirtueMart, including pre-built frameworks to simple but the powerful GUI template creation software.
Chapter 5, Going Live explains what to do about handling orders, refunds, and so on, when our VirtueMart store goes live.
Chapter 6, Killer SEO explains how to make use of all the Joomla! and VirtueMart SEO features, in a crowded web, to make sure that our new store is found by the search engines.
Chapter 7, Extending Joomla! and VirtueMart covers a number of ways to get more out of Joomla! and VirtueMart to add exciting features to our shop. Want to add an affiliate campaign, detect which country your customers come from, or add PHP and JavaScript to your site content? Then this chapter is for you.
Chapter 8, VirtueMart Alternatives explains how VirtueMart does not suit every occasion. If you want to have simple product sales from articles, open a downloads store or don't mind paying to get even more features than VirtueMart, then this chapter is the one to read.
Chapter 9, Blueprint – Making an Android App out of Your Site Content explains how apps are big business and all the big businesses have an app. This blueprint chapter will take you one recipe at a time towards wrapping your site in an Android app and publishing it on Google Play.
Appendix, Joomla! and VirtueMart Resources introduces some additional resources for your reference.
A modern Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. All the recipes have been thoroughly tried and tested on a Windows 7 PC but should cause no trouble to the moderately experienced Linux/Mac user to perform on their machines.
Similarly, although all of the recipes have been tried and tested on the Joomla! recommended Rochen hosting service, they could easily be completed on any other host that meets the required specifications or a self-hosted WAMP or LAMP setup.
The hosting requirements are as follows:
PHP v5.2.17
MySQL 5.04+
Apache 2.x
It would also be neat if you installed a good FTP client like FileZilla for transferring Joomla!, VirtueMart and many other interesting things we will be talking about, onto your Web server. That's it!
This book is for readers of all levels who want to setup an e-commerce store with Joomla!. The guides and tutorials are set out as self-contained recipes so that readers who are new to Joomla! or VirtueMart can start off with the very basics of setting up their new store.
There are also many, more advanced tutorials such as configuring the more awkward aspects of VirtueMart or making your site into an Android app. These would be better suited for the existing VirtueMart administrators. However, it is hoped that the less experienced reader could be prepared for these more advanced recipes by reading and implementing the easier ones first.
Although the recipes start at an elementary level in terms of Joomla! and VirtueMart knowledge, it is assumed that the reader will have a good grasp of basic PC skills and a reasonable understanding of how to navigate around the control panel of their chosen hosting solution.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive".
A block of code is set as follows:
<!-- Slideshow 1 -->
<ul class="rslides" id="slider1">
<li><img src="images/1.jpg" alt=""></li>
<li><img src="images/2.jpg" alt=""></li>
<li><img src="images/3.jpg" alt=""></li>
</ul>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<!-- Slideshow 1 -->
<ul class="rslides" id="slider1">
<li><img src="images/1.jpg" alt=""></li>
<li><img src="images/2.jpg" alt=""></li>
<li><img src="images/3.jpg" alt=""></li>
</ul>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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