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

Modifying core VirtueMart classes


As you may be aware, all through the previous chapters, we never touch the core VirtueMart files. This is important in order to avoid headaches when we need to upgrade VirtueMart. If we modified the core files, they would be overwritten when upgrading and all our customizations will be lost. Obviously, this restriction limits our possibility of adding more useful functions to VirtueMart. Yet, we have to comply with this unless we would rather not do any upgrades or be willing to go to the trouble of updating our code whenever a new VirtueMart version comes out.

Starting from version 1.1.4, VirtueMart adds a new feature to allow us to write our own VirtueMart classes. This great enhancement is very similar to the templating system which allows us to supply our own template. As you may recall from Chapter 1, The VirtueMart Engine, VirtueMart classes are used to connect to the database and to provide underlying functions. Writing our own classes means we can...