Creating custom fields with Virtuemart 2 can be (thankfully) quite a lot more straightforward than with previous versions. But there are also far more options available with custom fields, including the scope for creating specialist plugin fields.
The disadvantage is that there is no longer any support for 'product types', which could be a useful feature of Virtuemart 1.1x, however the option for creating custom plugins may offer more flexibility as developers produce applications in the future. We will discuss plugin fields in more depth in a later article, for now we will look at simpler usage of custom fields.
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Our latest extension is the module Cobalt Featured Items. This module for Joomla 2.5 is designed to work exclusively with Cobalt, the content construction kit by MintJoomla. It displays selected Cobalt fields in a variety of layouts, including default list, horizontal list, thumbnails, accordion, tab pane, rotator, and highlighter.
The layouts available are the same as for our Featured Items Pro module for Joomla, and you can see a demo of the layouts here. The module can create extracts from the article text, and thumbnails from the image and gallery fields, also from images embedded in html text, which are automatically resized as required.
]]>This month's featured extension is the module for Joomla! 1.5 and 2.5, Featured Items Pro.
This module displays a short excerpt from articles in a selected category or section, or from a specified list of articles, with link and optional thumbnail image. The items can be displayed in a variety of layouts, including lists, tab panes, accordion, article rotator, highlighter, or thumbnails only.
The module supports articles both from the Joomla core content component and from Mighty Extensions Resources, also the K2 content component.
]]>This module extension for Joomla and Virtuemart is an alternative to the Virtuemart featured products module. It can be used to show featured products, top ten products, recent products, or random products from some or all categories.
The module is particularly useful when you want to display additional images for your products, as these are shown in a slideshow.
The products can be filtered by selected categories, and can now products according to the current category when a category browse page or a product flypage is being viewed.
Joomla is the world's most popular system for building and managing websites. It is an example of a 'content management system' - often abbreviated to CMS. This article discussess some of the reasons for Joomla's popularity.
Why Use a CMS?
In the early days of the web, most websites consisted of static html pages. The site content of a typical website seldom changed, and when it did, it was neccessary to edit the actual page html code, requiring at least a basic level of expertise. However, for all but the most simple of websites, these days this is not a practical way to manage a website. Individuals and businesses want the freedom to be able to manage their site content without having to learn coding: the solution is a CMS.
For large businesses the preferred choice is always likely to be a custom CMS. However creating a custom CMS can be a complex, time and resource consuming process, requiring extensive programing, and will typically cost many thousands of pounds, making it an unrealistic option for small and even medium-sized businesses. Fortunately there are many 'off-the-shelf' content management systems available, the most popular of which is Joomla.
]]>We specialise in professional extensions for the Joomla!®** Content Management System. We have a variety of professional components, modules and plugins, also some products available for free download. These are simplified versions of the commercial products, but fully working. All our extensions are open-source.
Our customers include professional web designers and developers creating websites for their clients, as well as webmasters and website owners looking for well-designed extensions that will add something extra to their site.
]]>This extension allows you to create an XML product feed for your Virtuemart store for upload to Google Merchant Centre. The latest release, version 3.0.0, for the first time is compatible with Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5 as well as 1.5.
We also have an updated release for Virtuemart 1.1x and Joomla 1.5, version 2.1.0. This includes some minor changes to update the feed to the latest Google feed specification.
The extension includes many features designed to give you an accurate and informative product feed that closely matches the Google feed specs. These include:-
- Product variant display
- Support for additional product attributes such as size, color etc
- Support for the Google Category attribute
- Additional countries, those supported are now: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, China, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the Czech Republic
- Support for sale_price, and sale price effective date attributes
- Additional product images
- Feed can use Virtuemart product type data fields
For the first time both releases allow you to choose whether or not to display prices including tax by passing this as an URL parameter - useful if you want feeds for both the US and European countries.
]]>For example, if you just want to show a module on the checkout page, or the main category browse pages, or for a particular category, or even to a particular shopper group, this module allows you to do this.
The new release, version 1.2.0, includes additional options to filter by manufacturer, to exclude specific categories, and to filter by SSL/non-SSL pages. Also for the first time we have a version of the module that is compatible with Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5.
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We are happy to announce the release of our new image slideshow module for Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5, Mod Panelsider. This module displays your images in an attractive and unusual scrolling javascript slideshow. The display consists of a main image with previews of the previous and next images in two semi-opaque side panels.
This is our first extension release designed specifically for Joomla 2.5: we wanted to take advantage of some of the advanced features only possible with Joomla 2.5.
The module comes in 3 versions: the basic version which requires no external extensions, a version for Ignite Gallery, and a version for FW Gallery.
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Version 3 includes some great new features:-
- The layout is completely flexible, it can be resized to any dimensions required, to fit into any site;
- unlimited images can be displayed;
- the puzzle now includes a timer, user time scores are now uploaded to a database table and displayed;
- social sharing buttons encourage users to advertise your site by posting the puzzle to their Twitter and Facebook accounts