Have installed the latest beta, and am cautiously thrilled about the ability to specify Joomla templates within VM.
VERY key question though...as best as I can tell, a Joomla template can be specified at the category level, while this is encouraging, I'm hoping that the same can (or will be able to) be done at the Manufacturer and Vendor level.
Example: A consortium of authors are selling books that may be in 2 or 3 different categories, so I'd want searches/browses to use site template regardless of category, but if the user views product details, I'd like to have a Manufacturer(author) or Vendor (publisher) variation of a Joomla template used there.
This seems inherently more sensible to me, but I'm not building it, lol.
Thanks inadvance....looking forward to an RC on this one - great improvements so far!
I would appreciate if I could assign a different template style or header to each Manufacturer, too (Artist in my case, as I will use it for my Gallery website).
Assigning different templates to categories already works fine in VM1.5Beta.
However, if I understand the new template features in Joomla 1.6 correctly (I didn't play with it yet), this can also be set in the native Joomla 1.6 template manager.
See here:
http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1064-preview-of-the-new-template-manager-in-joomla-16.html (http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1064-preview-of-the-new-template-manager-in-joomla-16.html)
That looks promising too, but would present some inherent problems (at least for my situation). It seems you'd have to have a menu item for each author/artist that wanted a variation of a template.
As well (and I'm not sure how VM1.5 is handling Itemids), but the default ItemID for VM was always the first occurence of com_virtuemart in the table jos_menus, so relying on Menu Items and site settings risks "losing" your current template selection (on whatever basis) and falling back to the site default template (annoying and confusing to the user). This has been a problem for me in the past when there are multiple VM menu items with different modules configured for each of them(eg. Shop, My Account, Manufacturers). VM will "forget" which menu item was selected to arrive wherever it is at the moment, and get the default module settings for the first VM menu item
With so many up-an-coming versions of everything it's hard to keep track, and know how these features will work together, but knowing that VM is at least considering conditionally different templates suggests it will be a relatively easy hack to have it look at the current manufacturer or vendor when it's choosing an alternate template.
It is not hard to add the feature you are talking about.
Where would I send the wheelbarrow full of gold and jewels to show my appreciate for such a feature? :D