Is it time to move on yet ?

[veeco]

Hello, i've been provide solution for my client with virtuemart since 2009, this month as the End of Life for joomla 1.5, i would like your opinion about vm2:
1. does the concept from phpshop has changed (the way we modified things) ?
2. what's your learning curve to understand vm2 ?
3. do you think vm2 is enough to replace vm1 in term of stability and features ?
4. at the moment i also consider opencart as it can integrate seamlessly with joomla 2.5, what's your opinion about it ?

Thanks a lot for your response

[jenkinhill]

There is a learning curve as people with no html, css and php knowledge are finding. But for a reasonably experienced web developer or someone out of school who has studied IT well there are no coding issues. I think the difficulty some have is to see the new way of working, which is different from VM1 and 1.1. VirtueMart 2 core is very powerful and easily expandable with plugins.

With VM2 there is no core hacking like before. Template and Language overrides handle the layouts and plugins do the extra bits, such as special shipping or payment processing. It is not yet 4 months since release and already people are making impressive stores.

[brentonking]

I am so much more impressed with VM2. But don't expect to to just flick over the VM2 and expect everything to work perfectly as it was in VM1. Some features are still being developed and you may not get 100% of your VM1 functionality straight away. So make sure you move isn't rushed at the last minute.

jenkinhill raises good points too. If you were able to tweak VM1 files yourself, you should be able to get your head around 2 easily. With that, I must stress the importance or using template override files when tweaking though, otherwise you will lose your work with every VM update - obviously. And at this point in the development updates are being pushed constantly and you don't want to be updating/re-uploading your php files every couple of weeks.

[Bruce Morgan]

I find your statement of support for VM reassuring because I have been as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.  I have 8+ years invested with VM (and predecessors) and and with each major revision I find I am less able to modify it to my needs without outside assistance.  Ther seems to be some question as to whether some some key features (custom attributes) actually work or not.  I am just hopeing to ride the old platform for 3-9 more months until things become a little more clear.

I hear a lot of talk about template and language overrides.  I understand the concept and think it is great but I have not seen a good explanation of how to implement it.  A single step-by-step explanation of a simple example would be great if someone could help me out.  This could be a huge help since one of my complaints with VM1.x was that I was that I had to hire out some custom hacks to make it work like I needed and every VM became a huge pain.

[charles99]

I like VM2 and was a major user of VM1, but since upgrading to VM 2, I have ran into a lot of problems on the design side and editing side.  With each update you can't wonder whats going to break or stop working?  And this is what lead me to Opencart!   I needed something that waas easy for my clients to use and would works 99% of the time.  I can handle the 1% & bugs, but  until VM 2 is stable I am limiting my risk factor and just stay with VM1 until VM 2 is really stable...

[jenkinhill]

Bruce, template overrides were part of Joomla 1.5, but were never used for VirtueMart 1.1 as it needed to be compatible with Joomla 1.0 as well as 1.5 in the early days.

Thare are many articles explaing overrides - here are some:

http://www.joomlatutorials.com/joomla-tips-and-tricks/39-joomla-templating/90-getting-started-with-joomla-template-overrides.html
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=145996
http://docs.joomla.org/Understanding_Output_Overrides

There was a plugin for language overrides in Joomla 1.5 but they became part of the core with Joomla 1.6 when the multi-language concept was enhanced -

http://www.spiralscripts.co.uk/Joomla-Tips/using-language-files-with-joomla-extensions-a-short-guide.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7267006/how-do-you-modify-the-login-form-in-joomla

Hope these help!

[Bruce Morgan]

Thank you.  The language files overrides seems pretty straightforward and I gave it a try and it worked as per the examples in your links.  The template and views overrides are not as clear.

For example in your post http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=98647.0 , you describe how to resize the main product image.  I tried amending the css file and it worked fine but did not survive the next update.  You also mentioned that you could append it to the joomla template css file.  How would I make this an override that weoul remain after the next update?

[jenkinhill]

Add css styles to be used as overrides in your Joomla template css file. I add them at the end of that file. Then they only get overwritten when and if you change Joomla templates. I usuall add !important to each new style definintion.

[Bruce Morgan]

Hate to be a complete dunce, but are you referring to my active theme for my site front-end?  In my case this would be Zephyr.  There is a file template.css in the css folder so I could do as you suggested.  If I do this will I need to turn off the "use VM CSS" checkark in the shop configuration?

[jenkinhill]

You can try with VM css off and let the Zephyr theme style the layout, although you may find that you do need some of the style settings from VM css.

[Bruce Morgan]

Okay, I read you other post on overrides of CSS and cut and pasted all of the code from vm_ltr.css into the zephyr template.css files and turned off the VM css.  Starting to maker some headway!