It sometimes happens that you want to publish a Joomla module in a custom position on a Virtuemart page, or perhaps you only want the module to appear on specific pages, such as the product details or category page. For example, you have a custom HTML module that gives some information about shipping, and you just want to display it on the product details page. The normal Joomla method of assigning a module page is to use the menu assignment, but this is not possible in our example, because a Virtuemart product details page will not normally correspond to a Joomla menu item. So how to do it? It turns out that actually there is more than one approach to solving this problem.

Joomla is the world's most popular system for building and managing websites. It is an example of a 'content management system' - often abbreviated to CMS. This article discussess some of the reasons for Joomla's popularity.

Why Use a CMS?

In the early days of the web, most websites consisted of static html pages. The site content of a typical website seldom changed, and when it did, it was neccessary to edit the actual page html code, requiring at least a basic level of expertise. However, for all but the most simple of websites, these days this is not a practical way to manage a website. Individuals and businesses want the freedom to be able to manage their site content without having to learn coding: the solution is a CMS.

For large businesses the preferred choice is always likely to be a custom CMS. However creating a custom CMS can be a complex, time and resource consuming process, requiring extensive programing, and will typically cost many thousands of pounds, making it an unrealistic option for small and even medium-sized businesses. Fortunately there are many 'off-the-shelf' content management systems available, the most popular of which is Joomla.

We have a new release, version 4.5, of GooglebaseXML, our product feed extension for Joomla and Virtuemart. For the first time the latest version of the feed is compatible with Joomla 3 and Virtuemart 3 (see below for more information on this).

The extension is designed to create a feed that is fully compatible with Google's product feed specification, that you can use to submit your store products through the merchant centre to Google shopping.