Comments on: VirtueMart, a.k.a. crappyMart

By: AKF_nik

AKF_nik — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:38:37 +0000

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?

By: Leroni

Leroni — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:05:43 +0000

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?

By: Alex le

Alex le — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:08:46 +0000

@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.

By: esperado

esperado — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:34:15 +0000

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

By: sr3d

sr3d — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:54:27 +0000

@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

By: M. Zijlstra

M. Zijlstra — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:48:46 +0000

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

By: Alex Le

Alex Le — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 03:59:42 +0000

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!

By: tim

tim — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 03:31:14 +0000

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