Put your message here! Contact me for more information
 

 







« “Why Startups Condense in America”
What is your body type? »

 

VirtueMart, a.k.a. crappyMart

June
13
2006

Joomla & Mambo
Web Technolgy

view comments
permalink

I’m working on customizing this component for Joomla to use for my business venture with my friend Syed.  It turned out that VirtueMart’s code is pretty crappy - badly written I mean.  Yes VirtueMart (may) works but customizing it is like separating black and red beans from one another.  If I can rate the readability of the code, I’d vote for a -1:  PHP code is mixed with HTML and with a bunch of tables, for instance the file shop.browse.php.   VirtueMart also lacks the flexibilty in terms of front-end module customization.  I have to write a few custom modules just to format the categories listing the way I’d like.  The bundled category listing module is just too bulky to be rewritten.  Looking at the code I have to go through to customize virtuemart for my template, I can only say #$#$%@&.  I wonder why there are still so many people using VirtueMart out there.  Or it’s just the least sucky of the worst?  VirtueMart needs to be rearchitected if it wants to be more popular.
Compared VM to the Hoavui.com e-commerce engine that I co-written with my friend last year, Hoavui’s code is much better.  Currently we used a MVC approach with OOP design from the ground up.  My plan for later is to convert Hoavui.com’s code to Joomla to take advantage of the CMS features of Joomla.  The missing parts of the engine is taxation, more payment gateways (Hoavui.com only supports PayPal IPN for now), and a more modular architecture.

The VirtueMart site I’m currently working on is http://www.refillprinting.com.  Come have a look and leave me some comments.  I like the logo most, took me at least 5 hours to get it.

Entry posted at 4:21 pm on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006, and it is filed under Joomla & Mambo, Web Technolgy

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

 Subscribe in a reader. Enjoy reading my blog? Subscribe to my RSS to read new post whenever I publish something new.

 

8 Responses to “VirtueMart, a.k.a. crappyMart”



tim
9:31 pm
October 1, 2006
#890

I am trying to customize the virtuemart module to list my products in rows like you have. However, I can not find the code I need to edit to get the right styles and where to insert my overlib functions to get some more dynamic product descriptions. PLEASE HELP!! if you have any suggestions drop me a line I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Tim




Alex Le
9:59 pm
October 1, 2006
#891

Tim, the file you really need to edit is

administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html_templates/browse/browse_1.php

I removed most of the code from crappyMart, oops, I mean virtuemart. There are some other files you need to edit but it’s been 3 months since I worked with VM so I don’t remember all the details.

Don’t you just feel like you want to punch someone when you read the code of VM trying to customize it? I know I did.

Good luck!




M. Zijlstra
9:48 am
January 29, 2007
#14953

I’m working on a website and it uses the VirtueMart of Joomla. You can buy CD’s and DVD’s, books and cards. I have added two Product types (dutch) : ‘Audio CD’s en DVD’s’ and ‘Boeken’.

The product Type ‘Audio CD’s en DVD’s’ has 3 parameters, knowing:
- spreker
- uitgever
- aantal cd’s

The product Type ‘Boeken’ has 4 parameters, knowing:
- auteur
- uitgever
- ISBN
- aantal pagina’s

Now I want to show these items on browse_1.php, but I don’t know how to do this.

On this page all the products (50 per page) are shown; the books, cd’s and DVD’s.
When the product is a DVD or CD, the paramaters as described above has to be displayd, when it is a book, the other product type parameters has to be displayd.

I’d really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks,
Mario




sr3d
10:54 am
January 30, 2007
#15112

@Mario,

I think what you have to do is to have a switch/ if conditional control block to distinguish what template to use for each product type. When you have if statement to check for the product type (or category id) in place, you can just design the browser_1.php page to show the correct format.

I cannot go into too much details because I haven’t worked with VM that extensively anymore. If you know PHP then it should not be too bad to customize the browser_1.php page. You just have to dig through the code a bit to know where to put the checkpoint.

Good luck and let me know if you need some help :)

Alex




esperado
8:34 am
February 19, 2008
#118878

Yes, indeed, Virtuemart is one of the worse code i ever seen. And customising-it is realy painful. And, if you look to the DB requests, you die ! One hundred calls to get the captain’s age !
In fact, very often, you laugh, if you don’t cry) finding functions like:
publish($text) {
echo $text;
return true
}
But the most interesting thing, for me, was the forrm to set the customer account: 5 files+lang for a simple form, a lot of variables setted first, then a “case:” for all the inputs, and a while to build the form.
Reduced by 10 in simply coding-it “inline”.
The most expensive and time cunsuming freeware you can find ;-)




Alex le
11:08 am
February 19, 2008
#118929

@esperado

I just haven’t bother with VirtueMart since. Based on your code-quote, I can see why they have such a method to simulate custom properties, or to help with translation down the road. Nonetheless, the whole thing is a mess.

On the commercial site, X-cart is also a big, f-ing mess. I worked with Xcart and I do want to kill someone too. It hurts you more to work in Ruby on Rails and then come back to see such horrible code written.

I have not tried out Magento so I don’t know what the code looks like but the UI is extremely slick and Web2.0 friendly. You may as well give it a try.




Leroni
6:05 am
March 21, 2008
#131994

Im trying to remove the ascending order button and alot of other things to customize. This is very painful and I dont if I should laugh or cry. The manual that comes with viruemart is a total waste of time .

Is there any books on virtuemart?




AKF_nik
4:38 pm
August 15, 2008
#198815

I am completely in agreement with the comments above about how unnecessarily convoluted and messy virtuemart’s display pages are. For some reason none of my images will show up on the browse listing page… I checked browse_1, but i cannot find the function anywhere “ps_product::getimage” so I don’t know why it doesn’t work. This is about the 900th problem I’ve had trying to set up a store, which should have been a fairly straightforward process. I’m interested in switching to another shopping cart, but I don’t know of another one that integrates well with Joomla! (and I’m using the Joomla! CMS because there are a lot of other parts of my site that need to integrate with the store). Any suggestions?




 

Leave a Reply