Is Virtuemart 2 simply broken???

[Bruce Morgan]

Since the time of my last post I have taken on a partner with a history of creating succesful e-commerce web sites.  His first recommendation was to dump Joomla and Virtuemart and design a new site around Opencart.  He was able to create a test site within a few days using an inexpensive commercial template and it even included all of the users and historical data. One extension even allows the entry of cost data to be able to track profits.  We have a little customization to do but the overall impression after playing with it for 10 dys is that it works right out of the box and is very user friendly and stable.  In other words, it is everything that VM is not, at least not version 2.x.

I spent over a month trying to migrate my exisiting site to the new VM and test it on a local installation.  NOTHING was easy and a lot of things were impossible.  There are literally hudreds of forum posts about custom fields and to date I am not certain if this feature really works at all or simply impossible to understand and implement.  Has anyone noticed that VM is not longer a Joomla eztensions "Editor's Choice"?

No new shop owner in his right mind would ever create a new shop using VM.  If I were commited to staying with the Joomla CMS, I would probably swithch to Mijo shop based on Opencart.  With a import function for VM it should be easy to transfer files based on my experience so far.  T

The final test will be when we try and take oure new site live withing the next 7-10 days.  I do anticipate a few problems but once the transfer is complete I expect that I will once again be able to spend my time developing my business instead of constantly applying band-aids to my web site.

Bruce