Joomla and VirtueMart - a good solution for a small and medium online store

    Our studio has completed the development of a new online gift store. To create a store website, we used a bunch of CMS Joomla and Virtuemart . I would like to dwell on the latter, since this product is deprived of the attention of the habrasociety, although for sure many use it in development. So, what is VirtuMart good for and what can be noted with its shortcomings:

    1. This product is completely free, but at the same time it implements many functions necessary to create a full-fledged store. At least, I could not find any other free product that has the same wide range of functionality

    2. Support for the Russian language is implemented very well.

    3. This is an open source product with a fairly open structure, ie modifications, creation of themes, writing additional modules are implemented quite easily. Although there are some drawbacks, apparently transferred to VirtueMart from older versions, when it worked only with Joomla version 1. In any case, not all standard Joomla 1.5 standard features for modifying design templates are used here: creating a store theme is performed separately from the Joomla template , and for some things you have to go into the source codes of the component.

    4. The speed of work. It is difficult here, you can set both plus and minus. Of course, the script of an online store with a sufficiently large amount of goods (we now have about 600 positions) can no longer work out instantly. Therefore, we must not forget that a decent store speed on VirtuMart can be achieved only with caching enabled.

    5. SEO. In combination with the sh404SEF component for Joomla, our store works great. For all product categories and each product individually, CNCs are created with unique meta tags. There are some technical points, but they can all be circumvented (if anyone is interested, some of the "pitfalls" of the interaction between sh404SEF and VirtueMart are described in my blog ).

    You can see the working solution created by us on Joomla 1.5 and VirtueMart here: Gift Shop and Holidays “Giving Joy” .

    Additional information: The
    functionality of the VirtueMart online store (in English): virtuemart.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=69&Itemid=142
    Russian assembly of VirtueMart (we did not use it, but there is documentation in Russian): virtuemart. ru

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