After more than 5000 downloads of our test releases and approximately 400 participating testers we are proud to announce the Gold version of the vm2.0.x series.
Endless forum threads were read and answered. Many ideas were taken and went into the core. Hundreds of community users helped the team with their feedback, thank you for your participation.

Download at dev.virtuemart.net com_virtuemart.2.0.22a_extract_first.targz.zip or com_virtuemart.2.0.22a_extract_first.zip

Still 2.0.x?

This version 2.0.22 already has many features which were written in autumn 2012 for the next major version 2.2. To keep updating easy, we decided to add as many features as possible from vm2.2 into vm2.0 series without breaking the APi. The next step for vm2.2 will be updating some extensions, caused by the changed API. It is in our interest that templates have a long lifetime.

Powered by PHP-Storm

The VirtueMart project is now powered by Phpstorm, which is for us the best PHP IDE. Using this tool the code has been cleaned up again.
Some hash based caches improve the performance. Split language files reduce the consumed RAM noticeably. This means you can have more users parallel visiting your store.

AvaTax included

We are proud to announce the newest certification with Avalara, VirtueMart 2 now has a native solution integrated for a fully automated sales tax compliance for North America and beyond.
AvaTax Calc integrates with Virtuemart to deliver real-time sales tax calculations based on up-to-date sales and use tax rules. This includes sourcing rules, product taxability and jurisdiction assignment. Increased audit activity by taxing authorities demands businesses prove sales tax compliance through accurate calculations and reporting. AvaTax Calc makes compliance simple, with transaction history and on-demand reporting.
Avalara's sales tax rates Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering is more than just a calculator for sales tax rates. AvaTax Calc is an easily integrated, dynamic tax decision engine. AvaTax dramatically improves accuracy because at initial calculation, AvaTax Calc:

• Validates and corrects the address—including ZIP code +4
• Identifies product taxability
• Applies the most current, up-to-date tax rules and regulations
• Verifies tax holiday status
• Applies sourcing rules (where taxable)
• Automatically assigns correct jurisdiction

THEN the service provides sales tax calculation for the transaction—all in real-time with no delay or interruption to workflow—and applies it in your billing system.

Roadmap:

For the vm2.2 we plan
- joomla 3.x compatible
- native joomla ACL
- enhanced customfields, in special also the plugins
- enhanced shopperfields (for cart)
- enhanced cart helper

Fixes:
- Security:
a) fixed, that registered could unreveal orders of anonymous shoppers
b) fixed, that unpublished catgories could be accessed via direct link.
- Vm2 two times in the same database with different prefixes should work now
- product->created_on became sometimes 0 =>fixes "New products"
- fixed canonical links
- removed that it takes only 5 products per run in migration
- fixed for neighboured products for some sortings
- Bug fixes for clone products.
a) product prices wasn't clone
b) after cloning the product shopper group was wrong
- pagination settings. Please review after updating your pagination sequences
- various W3C compliance
- error in the calculator and calculation of rules per bill with categories. An index was used in two different foreach loops.
- fixed images of related products
- FE product editing
- various html fixes
- store priceWithoutTax on DB, changes revenue report net price calculation. Be aware that you must execute for this the "migration" task in the revenue view.
- customfield prices use now the currency of the selected price
- Search plugin: query includes the shopper group
- deleting of category let references left

Administration:
- drag n drop ordering for products by StephanBais
- Added an option to use fancy or facebox.
- configuration for orderstatus and emails to be sent
- order editing, Thanks to Ondrej and Maik
a) address data
b) items
- delivery notes creation for orders, Thanks to Reinhold
- configuration of header and footer for invoices, delivery notes, etc, Thanks to Reinhold
- mediahandler, search enhanced and pagination works
- new filter for roles in media view
- changed behaviour of media thumbs, the path/url is not stored unless it is an overwrite
- added resetThumbs to delete all entries and thumbs to adjust to new pattern or changed thumbnail size
- More sorting options
- Help button in every backend view, showing the online information of docs.virtuemart.net
- Product with price= 0 can be added to cart. There is also a new parameter for standard payment to no invoice on order total=0
- Added to paypal refunded
- Paypal email http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=114514.0
- Paypal : force UTF-8 encoding
- Shopperfields use default value now, so you can use it for setting the value default on "agree to tos".
- removed &: from links
- little change in migrator, should help if you have a slow machine and a lot products
- Added two migration scripts from the forum for vm1 product attributes and related products
- Add shipment and payment methods to sample data
- More tooltips, enhanced GUI.

Frontend:
-Fancybox
a) Added option to show related products in the "add to cart popup"
b) "add to cart popup" is template able
- Added the nice chosen.js to most FE dropdowns
- emails send in the shoppers language
- splitted language files
a) shopperfield language in FE/xx-YY.com_virtuemart_shoppers.ini
b) order language in FE/xx-YY/en-GB.com_virtuemart_orders.ini
c) => Most shops run with the fallback for english, so it is loading most time at least 2 languages. Cleaning and reducing the size of the language files gave us around 4 MB Ram.
- Please accept tos is directly displayed, less redirects
- added Meta for homepage
- Consistent display of discounted and old prices with line-through on product, homepage, cart, order, email and print view.
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=116607.0

Optimisation:
- function getProduct and getProductSingle are cached on hash keys based on the parameters
- removed unecessary getProduct function in cart
- neighboured products only loaded, if activated
- some code sniffing stuff. Just removed some warnings, made some functions to static, ...
- replaced, removed $this->loadHelper('image') by if class exists ...
- more JText::_ is used for example for "product availability"

For templaters:
- Fixed country state list for shipto,.. is now usuable two times on the screen (easier cart checkout).
- added quantity to product, so that it can be used easier in the cart popup
- added to the helper VirtueMartCart the functions blockConfirm and setRedirectDisabled for ajax based one page checkouts.
- Added function setCartPricesMerge(), makes it easier to change single prices, without touching the whole array.