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.

In the past, we have already published a Virtuemart cart module with images as part of our standalone Virtuemart themes. Unfortunately, this used to require a modification of Virtuemart-own files (it did not affect complete themes).

For that reason and on request by our customers, we have now published a new module for Joomla! & Virtuemart that does not only iron out this unpleasant side-effect but also provides some great new features. Thus, we now discontinue our support of the old Minicart theme.

We are proud to present our latest release, a Joomla! extension for Virtuemart, the Joomla! eCommerce solution. In Virtuemart, managing meta data is pretty difficult or not possible at all. Previously, meta data has been derived from existing data, e.g. the short description of the product, the category description or the product or category title. Thus, Virtuemart has pre-assigned the values.