SundaySchool.com - Selling digital and physical products

[Stephen Roberts]

I recently launched a new site that I helped build for a client: http://www.sundayschool.com. This very large and complex site took a team of 4 nearly 6 months to complete. The site is built on Joomla! 2.5 and VirtueMart 2.0.6 with a custom template built on the Gantry framework. Some of the significant features include:

• The sale of physical items (payments are authorized only, not captured)
• The sale of digital items (payments are immediately captured)
• Physical and digital items in the same cart in which case payments are authorized only, and shipping is calculated only on the physical items
• Digital eBooks are delivered through a service called Ingram
• Digital music is delivered through Amazon S3
• Purchasing a membership automatically upgrades the user's account so they immediately get discounts on products plus access to exclusive content
• JW Player streams audio/video content from Amazon Cloudfront
• "Similar Items" automatically shows products in the same Genre or Brand
• The product catalog synchronizes with several external data sources
• Images are retrieved via Amazon Cloudfront

The site offers many more features. My favorite is the cart animation at the top-right when a product is added to the cart.

SundaySchool.com uses DigiToll Downloads (http://www.digitollsoftware.com) to deliver digital content (thus being able to deliver content through Ingram and Amazon S3 simultaneously).

Enjoy the site and I welcome all comments and suggestions!

[Limonbay]

I love the design and the concept. Congratulations.

[vigier]

You made some cool stuff there! Don't like the blue-ish color you use, but that's personal. Beside that it really looks great.

Minor detail: when I select "Adult", the name of the page (shown in the titlebar of IE and on my taskbar) also changes to "Adult". That shows in what mode you are shopping, but over here "Adult" is suggested with porn. If someone has your site open at the background and someone else looks at the taskbar, that might give some strange thoughts...

[Stephen Roberts]

Minor detail: when I select "Adult", the name of the page (shown in the titlebar of IE and on my taskbar) also changes to "Adult". That shows in what mode you are shopping, but over here "Adult" is suggested with porn. If someone has your site open at the background and someone else looks at the taskbar, that might give some strange thoughts...

Haha, you're right! Noted.

Thanks!

[craig182]

Wow, I like it! It is nice to know work which takes a long time  (6 months) pays off and you see the final product.

The cart button you mention is it programmed by yourself or is in an addon?

Thanks

[Stephen Roberts]

The cart module is custom-coded with a template override. Many of the functionalities reside in the template overrides to avoid hacking the core. The core of Joomla! and VirtueMart hasn't been hacked at all, so everything is upgradeable.

[craig182]

That's where I went wrong. I guess you learn from these things.