Just when we thought that the additional workload that is so typical for the time before Christmas - you certainly know what we are talking about - was slowly drawing to an end with the last days before Christmas, the Virtuemart Core team decided to surprise its users once more with some great news at the end of the year. Virtuemart 2.0 has now been released in a stable version!

Some weeks ago, we have published a new Joomla! & Virtuemart enhancement that allows a simple and flexible integration of your Virtuemart online shop with product portals and services such as Google Merchant Center (used to be Google Base).

Integrating Virtuemart with Product Portals – How to Proceed

The enhancement consists of a basic component which provides the infrastructure to aggregate your data and ensures a simple and central management of the interfaces. The interfaces are Joomla! plugins which can easily be installed using the Joomla! installer. If a plugin is installed for a service, the configuration of the respective provider is also available centrally in the component.

The standard Virtuemart modules you normally get for Virtuemart are difficult to customize both in functionality and design. This is due to the fact that they are not up-to-date as they do not use the MVC principle Joomla! uses. The MVC principle allows you, for example, to adjust the way modules are output by your Joomla! template.

We have the solution: MVC Virtuemart Product and Menu Modules

In the course of the last weeks, we have published some Virtuemart modules addressing the problem mentioned above. Using our Virtuemart modules, you can present your products just the way you want. In addition to the option to customize the output via template overrides, our modules also provide default styles fulfilling today's web standards. All of our modules are XHTML and CSS compliant and structured in a search-engine optimized and table-free way. Thus, search engines such as Google can crawl and index your site without any problems.

A few hours ago, a serious security vulnerability (1.1.6 BLIND SQL INJECTION EXPLOIT) was discovered in Virtuemart 1.1.x. This vulnerability is currently spread via Twitter.

Consequently, we strongly advise users to take countermeasures as soon as possible to prevent any exploitation of this vulnerability. By manipulating the URL, a malicious code can be planted into the Joomla! installation which can be used to execute SQL commands, for example, and thus gain control over the website.