Update from the Virtuemart team (October 2010)

[Milbo]

Okey, the last update is loong time ago.

But we werent lazy, we feel the open beta is very near. Here a short update what we did the last months.

- Developed a new pluginsystem working within joomla which makes plugin writing for virtuemart the same like plugin writing for joomla. Atm the new pluginsystem is done for the paymentmethods. In Vm1.5 the paymentplugins get installed by joomla and then configurated as paymentmethods in virtuemart.
- a new Template system working within joomla. Vm1.5 allows using different joomla templates for the shop and per categories. The new template system allows template overrides as used in other components. Vm1.5 can override the layout of the shop homepage. It is also possible to override the layouts for browsing in a category and how to display the products in the category. In old terms expressed: The themes are now the joomla templates. The browsing page are the layouts for the categories. The flypages are now layouts of the productdetails view. You overide also the product view layout. What means override? For exampel,.. we  have in productdetail view two layouts. A normal product layout, lets call it default.php and an extra layout for pictures, lets call it picture.php.... Lets assume the shopowner wants to sell videos and installs a template with an extra layout for videos (would be then in templatefolder/html/com_virtuemart/productdetails). lets call it video.php. When you look then in the layout chooser, you see default, picture and video. You dont need all layouts in the template. The template system itself is done like the joomla ones.
- a new cart, which is now an true object and holds the userinformations in a session. The cart object can be viewed in the cart view, which shows all information at one page. It is possible to use something which is simular to the old checkout process with 4 stages. But at the end it points back to the cart. This architecture allows a two click cart. One click, check the data, the next click is to confirm the data. But every data can be accessed directly, it is not necessary for customers to walk through the checkout like before. It is very easy to fill in the already known information for registered users. It allows customization per layouts very easy. For exampel, the mails sent are easily customizable by the choosen shoptemplate (just override).
- a completly new calculation system, with a calculation class doing all the work. It is programmable by rules, which works atm with shoppergroups, categories and date, ... by quantity and country/state will follow. The calculator works with rules, so you can set for exampel the rule that all clothes of the category winter get a discount of 30% from february until autumn. Or you can set a general VAT, or a VAT for food and non-food articles (there is always a multiple selection possible). It should also follow a rule pattern for general calculations like margin, profit, commissions and so on. It is possible to overwrite the rules for a specific product (overwriting per product isnt in svn yet, but will be done this week). You can choose which prices you want to show. There are calculated up to 10 prices per product (withtax, savingamount, variation, ...) .
- There are now three configurable paths for the pictures of the shop and products. For exampel you want to use your product picture in a joomla article, no problem anymore.
-new permission object. We did a step to enhance the security, using a permission object, which only allows from outside to get data, but not setting (before it was stored in a global variable).
- in general *we use now the default joomla MVC pattern. *we use more Ids and not chars, for exampel instead of Y and N we use 1 and 0. * Better performance by reducing RAM load and using already loaded code. *No use of globals. *Already working on j1.6 (not heavily tested of course).

At the moment we want to hardcorely test the calculator. Storing and displaying of orders is on the final spurt. This system is also completly changed. The orders are now displayed by the payment plugins which stored them. We want to remove some small glitches before we release the beta.
But I think it is not too optimistic to say that we release maybe the open beta at the end of next week.

You may take a look here http://dev.virtuemart.net/redmine/projects/virtuemart/wiki/Setting_up_a_Development_Environment to find out how to manually install vm1.5. Especially the chapter "Installation of virtuemart into your IDE"

Greets

[franzpeter]

These are great news. But I have just one question? Today VM is not well integrated into Joomla, especially all those SEF and SEO things. Will the new VM be able to use the Joomla SEF or will it still be necessary to use some other solutions to do that job? Actually VM does not play very well with search engines.

[Milbo]

It works with the jooomla native solution. Well the router.php is not done yet. But vm1.5 is very well integrated into joomla

[sse34]

Hi good news, could you tell us when you plan to have end of beta phase ... roughly ?

[kbrookes]

This is great news guys, particularly the template overrides capabilities. If it's as extensive as it sounds this solves most of my frustration with the current state of VM.

Can't wait to get on board.

[k0nan]

http://virtuemart.net/news

about templating see attached screenshot

congrats everybody



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