VirtueMart

  • Add more, than one e-mail address to the Virtuemart store - and send mails to all of them

    By default, in the VirtueMart 1.1.* Store Information settings you can add only one e-mail address in Contact Information box. All important mails - as new order notifications, for example, will be sent there. What if - for various reasons - you need to add more, than one e-mail address?

  • Bypass the VirtueMart's built in currency converter

    Recently one of my clients needed an interesting feature: to have different, un-related prices for the products in his shop for each "currencies" he wanted to use. The quote signs aren't by mistake there, one of his "currencies" was for example Payments in USD from China... Interesting currency, what you think?

    At the first the problem seemed to be simple: since the existing VM framework let you define any kind of extra currencies, and also let you enter prices for products in all of your currencies, the logical step was to simply switch off the currency converter plugin, as was possible in VirtueMart 1.1.9 and earlier versions.

    But there is the first catch - this is no more possible.

  • Create an user group for users who can not put products in cart

    What? A shopping cart with users which can't actually shop?

    Weird or not, that was a recent request from one of my customers. He wanted to have a quick way to prevent some of his users from putting products in cart, but leave all other site functionality intact.

  • Did you upgraded to Joomla 1.0.13 and now you can't login?

    Do you are an early adopter and you upgraded to Joomla 1.0.13? And you have Community Builder, VirtueMart or SMF Bridge...and you cant' login right now, and/or your users are complaining about the same problem. We're sorry for you... Do you have a backup? Then is simple, restore the Joomla 1.0.12 files, overwriting the actual files with those from the official distribution package and restore the jos_users or similar (or at least the passwords column from that).

    Do you have backup, don't you? No??? Ouch... humm, then the job is a bit harder, but can be done!

    So, still you can do the file restore? Good, do it. Then read below!

  • How to sell your downloadable products?

    Yes, things like media files - or your software. No, I don't sell software - I give it away for free, for example here. Bu I build sites with selling capabilities. My favorite solution for it is VirtueMart, THE shop to be used with Joomla.

    Is powerful - but is not for beginners, you can easily lost here without proper guidance.

  • Invalid Token, in store config - when try to upgrade VirtueMart

    Time-to-time I am hitting the wall with this, even with 100+ VM sites in my portfolio, and parts of VM core having my signature. Here are few tricks wich usually solves the problem.

  • Multi-currency store: wrong currency on PayPal checkout

    VirtueMart is great when you want to set up a store which works with multiple currencies. You can set up your own prices for each currencies in your shop, or you can use one of available currency converters. The core functionality supports the use of European Central Bank's live currency rates, but there are plugins supporting other rates too.

    But you can run into trouble where you'd expect to not have any surprises: on PayPal checkout page.

  • PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template

    The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

  • Special quantity options for a VirtueMart Shopper Group

    A seemingly simple question caused serious headaches in past weeks. One of my clients who has an already seriously cross-hacked VirtueMart shop (SkinRich) asked me to make it possible, that a specific shopper group she had, the Distributors, namely, to be able to order products only in six-packs, making warehouse people's life much easier, and costs lower. The other users should have the default quantity options.

    After thinking a lot about how to solve the problem, I came out with a 4 line simple hack, which works perfectly for me.

  • Use plugins, show modules anywhere in a VirtueMart page

    It's a know fact between VirtueMart insiders, that you can use Joomla plugins in the product descriptions. For that you need to enable this by clicking a checkbox in VirtueMart's main configuration (VirtueMart Admin > Configuration > Global tab > Enable content mambots/plugins in descriptions? checkbox.)

    But what if you want to use plugins elsewhere, in other spots of the VirtueMart pages? For example in some other spot of the product details page - let's say to insert an availability calendar module under the main product image?

    Right, you can do it with a little code hack! Let's make our hands dirty with some PHP then!

  • Virtuemart PayPal old API problem - shipping not transferred to PayPal

    I am angry on Easter bunny. Really... He delivered to me a nasty surprise: lots of my customers complained during/after Easter weekend, that their shops, sometimes the Easter's week began to malfunction: the users using PayPal as payment gateway aren't charged correctly. After studying the problem, I found, that is happening on shops running versions of VirtueMart 1.1.3 to 1.1.9, charging shipping to customers and using the old PayPal API to communicate with the gateway. More precisely, the sipping net amount was not transferred, the shipping tax was sent correctly.

    Then, by searching for "virtuemart shipping not transferred to paypal" I discovered, that I am not alone: there where some 54k+ search results returned!

  • Virtuemart Shopper Group discount problem

    The VirtueMart forums are full of complaints like:

    When a shopper from my wholesale group (50% off) opens the product page it shows the parent products discounted price as the price of each child. Any help would be appreciated.

    So, here's the much awaited fix!

  • VirtueMart's SMTP problems

    More and more users are switching to Google Mail, Hotmail and other free mail services these days. It's a great move... unless you have VirtueMart and your Joomla is set to send your mails through SMTP. You may easily end seeing something like:

    Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to smtp.gmail.com:25

    The mails from other Joomla apps are sent, just the VirtueMart is behaving badly. Weird thing is, that you can see in the main Joomla config the mailer set up properly, and the port to be used is 465, as required for Google Mail, but as you can see the error message indicates that VirtueMart tries to use port 25! The problem is that VirtueMart has a code flaw, when sending mails through SMTP the port 25 is hardcoded, and isn't inherited from main Joomla configuration file.

    The fix is relatively easy, but you must get your hands dirty with some PHP code.