In this chapter, we have discussed what Joomla! is and what its major features are. We have also learned in which cases Joomla! will be a good choice. We then moved on to options available for adding e-commerce functionalities to Joomla!. We have seen that there are a variety of components available for adding e-commerce functionalities to Joomla!. We have introduced some of the popular components for different types of e-commerce functions, such as auction, affiliation, membership and paid access, and so on. We then discussed VirtueMart and its features.
VirtueMart is the most popular shopping cart component for Joomla!. We have learned that it supports most of the features a standalone shopping cart should have. VirtueMart is widely used because of its ease of administration, and rich features. It supports multiple payment and shipping modules, as well as multiple currencies and languages. We have also got some idea about how other shopping carts, such as osCommerce, Zen Cart, and Freeway can be used with Joomla!. Finally, we got a preview of the shop we are going to build in the next chapters.
The introduction is over, and it is now time to move to action. We are going to install Joomla! and start running VirtueMart in the next chapter.