Heavy question

[rs217000]

Hey all,

I'm building a site for a buddy who's trying to get his company off of the ground. He wants an online store to sell a few products from the current website. From the general Joomla community consensus, VirtueMart seems like the best way to go. Of course, I have a few questions:

-Does VirtueMart offer a way to list variations on a single product description? For example, if he were selling t-shirts that came in a possible 50 colors, could a drop-down selection list be added on one product, as opposed to displaying 50 different colored shirts products with the same basic style?

-How extensive is the discount customization feature? For example, would this be a possible application - If a customer buys an item from the shoes category, and an item from the socks category, could they receive a discount on the total of the two items?

-Ideally, I'd like to build the store on a local development server. How complicated is it to import the store to the already existing live site, and is there any good documentation available on the process?

-I'm including 128-bit SSL on the hosting plan (GoDaddy). For someone (myself) who has no experience building a site that needs to transition between http and https, how big of a challenge will I be facing...any good docs on the operation?

I'm sorry for being another person to drop an extremely loaded question on the board, but when customers' money is involved I get real paranoid. Any feedback would be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[jenkinhill]

1. You can use product attibutes for different sizes, colours etc.

2. Discount can be by coupon off the total value of an order, or shop items themselves can be given a "special" price.

3. Not too difficult to move servers, and local testing is good to make sure it will the job for you. I prefer to go straight to the live server for setup & testing.

4. Many people report problems configuting Joomla/Virtuemart on GoDaddy servers because of their non-standard setup. Host configuration is important, as a large proportion of the issues seen on these forums is server related.

[rs217000]

Thank you very much for your feedback.  I will look into that information with a bit more detail.

Is there a document available that hits on importing the local MySQL database to a live site DB?  I didn't really have much trouble doing it with my joomla site sans the VirtueMart, but I'm a little foggy on things like, which tables need to go over, any known issues...?

Thanks again for your feedback, Jenkin.

[CatawbaCoops]

A program like JoomPack might be in order here.
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1606/Itemid,35/

Develop the site locally or on a subdomain, pack that puppy up, and move it to the live server.

[rs217000]

That's a fantastic looking component.  How have I not seen that before?  I'll give it a shot.  Thanks again for your help, guys.