There is now a new release of Virtuemart, the popular e-commerce extension for Joomla 2.5. Version 2.6 is mainly a step on the way to the eventual release of Virtuemart 3, which will be compatible with Joomla 3, but it has some useful new features:-

• support for product gtin and mpn numbers
• the paypal plugin now displays the payment amount in the payment currency
• a recaptcha field for the registration
• encryption of plugin fields

You can find more information about this on the Virtuemart site.

Of particular interest to us is the fact that the gtin and mpn are now included as product data. These numbers are required when submitting a product feed to Google Shopping, and other shopping sites. This means that users of our own GooglebaseXML shopping feed extension will no longer need to use custom fields to supply this data, but can supply it directly in the product editor. Our latest release, version 4.2.0, is fully compatible with Virtuemart 2.6.

We have tested our Virtuemart extensions for compatibility with version 2.6. All will work, although for the following three extensions we did identify some minor issues: GooglebaseXML, Virtuemart Featured Product Grid, and Virtuemart Product Snapshot Pro. We have released new versions that deal with these.