Creating custom fields with Virtuemart 2 can be (thankfully) quite a lot more straightforward than with previous versions. But there are also far more options available with custom fields, including the scope for creating specialist plugin fields.
The disadvantage is that there is no longer any support for 'product types', which could be a useful feature of Virtuemart 1.1x, however the option for creating custom plugins may offer more flexibility as developers produce applications in the future. We will discuss plugin fields in more depth in a later article, for now we will look at simpler usage of custom fields.
]]>This month's featured extension is the module for Joomla! 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7, mod NewsTab.
This module allows you to display links to your Joomla news articles in a series of tabs, a format popular with many news websites. A simple application module would be to display 'latest', 'popular' and 'featured' articles using three tabs. However this module is extremely flexible, and is capable of far more than that. You can display up to 8 tabs
The module supports articles both from the Joomla core content component and from Mighty Extensions Resources, also the K2 content component.
]]>This extension allows you to create an XML product feed for your Virtuemart store for upload to Google Merchant Centre. The latest release, version 3.0.0, for the first time is compatible with Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5 as well as 1.5.
We also have an updated release for Virtuemart 1.1x and Joomla 1.5, version 2.1.0. This includes some minor changes to update the feed to the latest Google feed specification.
The extension includes many features designed to give you an accurate and informative product feed that closely matches the Google feed specs. These include:-
- Product variant display
- Support for additional product attributes such as size, color etc
- Support for the Google Category attribute
- Additional countries, those supported are now: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, China, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the Czech Republic
- Support for sale_price, and sale price effective date attributes
- Additional product images
- Feed can use Virtuemart product type data fields
For the first time both releases allow you to choose whether or not to display prices including tax by passing this as an URL parameter - useful if you want feeds for both the US and European countries.
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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.
]]>For example, if you just want to show a module on the checkout page, or the main category browse pages, or for a particular category, or even to a particular shopper group, this module allows you to do this.
The new release, version 1.2.0, includes additional options to filter by manufacturer, to exclude specific categories, and to filter by SSL/non-SSL pages. Also for the first time we have a version of the module that is compatible with Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5.
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We specialise in professional extensions for the Joomla!®** Content Management System. We have a variety of professional components, modules and plugins, also some products available for free download. These are simplified versions of the commercial products, but fully working. All our extensions are open-source.
Our customers include professional web designers and developers creating websites for their clients, as well as webmasters and website owners looking for well-designed extensions that will add something extra to their site.
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We are happy to announce the release of our new image slideshow module for Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5, Mod Panelsider. This module displays your images in an attractive and unusual scrolling javascript slideshow. The display consists of a main image with previews of the previous and next images in two semi-opaque side panels.
This is our first extension release designed specifically for Joomla 2.5: we wanted to take advantage of some of the advanced features only possible with Joomla 2.5.
The module comes in 3 versions: the basic version which requires no external extensions, a version for Ignite Gallery, and a version for FW Gallery.
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Version 3 includes some great new features:-
- The layout is completely flexible, it can be resized to any dimensions required, to fit into any site;
- unlimited images can be displayed;
- the puzzle now includes a timer, user time scores are now uploaded to a database table and displayed;
- social sharing buttons encourage users to advertise your site by posting the puzzle to their Twitter and Facebook accounts
This release includes several improvements:-
- It adds support for Joomla 1.7
- It adds support for the latest version of the Amazon product advertising API (2011-08-01)
- It adds support for the new Italian and Chinese Amazon product advertising APIs (see https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1115)
We have a new release of our slideshow module for Joomla, mod Featured Items Slideshow. This module can display images from your Joomla! articles as a slideshow, with a caption taken from the text, and a link to the articles. The module finds your article images automatically, the administrator just needs to pick the section or category, or the individual articles.
Version 2 includes a completely new HTML 5 layout, supporting a variety of image transition effects.
The latest release also includes several other improvements:
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- the controller display is now optional
- the slideshow speed is now optional
- multiple images can be displayed from each article
- improved image resizing now allows you to specify the exact width and height of each image displayed.