Book Image

Joomla! VirtueMart 1.1 Theme and Template Design

By : Joseph Kwan
Book Image

Joomla! VirtueMart 1.1 Theme and Template Design

By: Joseph Kwan

Overview of this book

VirtueMart is the best shopping cart solution around for the Joomla! CMS. A VirtueMart template is a Joomla! template that is designed to create the overall look of a store. It puts in things such as a shopping cart bar, more shop-like graphics, more readable colors, and so on. A VirtueMart theme only impacts the area of the site actually controlled by the VirtueMart component. Themes work inside the overall framework. Applying custom templates and themes to give a unique look and feel to your VirtueMart web store will really attract customers! This book will guide you to build VirtueMart custom themes and templates. Joomla! VirtueMart 1.1 Theme and Template Design explains how the VirtueMart theme and template system works and points out ways to configure the default theme. It then goes on to look at each of the major templates with an emphasis on how to customize them. It then discusses individual page groups such as product list, product details, shopping cart, checkout, and invoice e-mails in the order they appear to your customer. After-sale services like invoice e-mail, account management, and order list are also discussed. The book also discusses the different components of a VirtueMart theme and will teach you how to build a theme from scratch. You will also learn advanced features like child products, advanced attributes, custom attributes, and product types. Topics like integration with Joomla! plugins and AJAX functions are also included. An Appendix provides a comprehensive template reference of the use and available fields of every template. Joomla! VirtueMart 1.1 Theme and Template Design is a practical guide for all those who want to make VirtueMart work for them. It will put many advanced features of this popular open source e-Commerce application at your finger tips.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Joomla! VirtueMart 1.1 Theme and Template Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Core browse templates


Product listing is unarguably the most important element on the product list page. There are two major factors that will affect the product listing: the product listing style, and the core browse template.

Core browse templates are used to define the layout and styles for each product in the product list. There are actually six different core browse templates in the default theme. We can define a default core browse template for general use and also a specific template for each of the product categories, as discussed in Chapter 2, The VirtueMart Defualt Theme. If you take a closer look at the templates, you will find that they are pretty much the same, except the last one which is for creating a PDF file.

We already saw the detail coding in the browse_1.php. We don't need to repeat it here again. So, let's start on some exercises with the browse_1 template right away.

Exercise 3.1: Adding an Ask-Seller link to the browse page

We know that in the product detail page, there...