For the past few weeks we have been involved in testing Virtuemart 2.9, which will eventually evolve into Virtuemart 3 when it is officially released. So we have gained a pretty good idea of what to expect when it does get released.
These are likely to be the main features:-
- Firstly, and most importantly, it will be fully compatible with Joomla 3 for the first time.
- The Paypal payment processor is much improved and now supports many more options and supports all the main Paypal payment systems, including website payments standard, express checkout, website payments pro and hosted payments pro.
- The Virtuemart plugin system has changed, though this change will probably be mainly noticeable to developers, they will need to update their plugins to reflect the new coding pattern. There is more info about this here.
- The stockable variant plugin is no more. If your site uses this and you want to update to Virtuemart 3 you will need to consider this point carefully: to some extent you can use the generic child variant field type instead, but the functions are not identical. There is also a new child variant field type under development, but it is not ready for use on a live site yet, hopefully it will be when VM3 is released.
Even so, the switch to Virtuemart 3 will definitely be an evolution not a revolution, so upgrading from Virtuemart 2.6 or the later releases of Virtuemart 2.0.x should not be a big shock. If you are wanting to migrate your site from Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5 to Virtuemart 3 and Joomla 3, you will want to do this first. Then you can use the Joomla updater to migrate to Joomla 3 - the process is described here.
The main difficulty with this process is likely to come from specialised templates - if your site uses a commercial e-commerce template it may well include features that are incompatible with Virtuemart 3. You will need to check with your template developer, or switch to a simpler template while you undertake the migration process.
When will VM3 be released?
We have no special knowledge about this. The latest release candidate 2.9.9 seems quite close to a stable release, but the developers I think want to avoid to problems that attended the release of Virtuemart 2, which was clearly released too early in its development, so are taking the time to clear out the bugs.
If you are planning a new Virtuemart e-commerce site it is almost certainly worth building it with the latest release of Joomla 3 and Virtuemart 2.9, with plans to update to VM3 when it becomes available. This will almost certainly save you a lot of work compared with the alternatives.
