Good news for the VirtueMart community.

VirtueMart 2.0 could be considers like a good cidre, excellent when produced, yet matures with age. You can say the same for VM2 whilst still young, the new release went very well, and has matured, like a good cidre or a first year wine, this can be demonstrated by the strong and active community of people who are helping the maturity process and this is just after only being released for 6 months.

The community has got used to the new methods, the forum is full of excellent tutorials, hints, tips, and tricks and there is a lot of communication in the forum between the team and the users, we have received a lot of input, good test reports, and fixes, so we would like to say a big thank you!

“A free community shopping cart used the world over”

There are many more new 3^rd party developer extensions in the new extensions directory and templates available for VM2, if you have not had a look check it out (http://oldextensions.virtuemart.com, http://extensions.virtuemart.net,3rd Party Extensions Board).

Security: We added a new filter for security, to prevent XSS

Tax:

• We have added a new tax type "VAT tax", Taxes of this type use the final price to recalculate the result.
• We also fine tuned the product edit view, which was often requested, which now calculates the cost price with given taxes, discounts and final price.
• We also focused on the little inconsistencies that some beginners were stumbling over it.

We had to do some changes on the custom system:

We tried to keep backward compatibility where possible and tested it with various plugins, however we cannot guarantee for all 3rd party plugins, so when you use a 3rd party custom plugin (this is not the shipment, payment, ...) please test or ask the developer before you update.

The plan for the future:

• we plan to add the multiple prices per shopper group
• A new layout for a kind of vm1 product types (you can order a lot of different variants of one product in one view),
• Editable orders
• Multivendor
• Bootstrap (for joomla 3.0)
• Enhance the vm2 custom system
• Combining the plugin stockable variant with dynamic child variant of the core.

“Based on Joomla MVC framework with all its advantage”

Please remember most features are written by community members, so we cannot guarantee that all of this will be in the next version, but some.

New Features:

• Send email to shoppers by orderstatus, and waiting list.
• New type of calculation rule "VAT tax"
• Price overwrites and calculation of the base price by given final price.
• The rounding of the currencies can be enabled again, using the value -1 in the setting for the rounding of prices.
• The settings for price rounding also affects now the prices in the cart
• Invoices: you can select in the configuration the default order status to send an invoice.
• Shopper will be able to be added to more than one shopper group.
• Adding vendor Address to order emails
• Dynamic child variants can now be configured, if displaying parent as option or not.
• Some template enhancements, like "back to category button", added classes and similar
• Added more valid_search_fields ='product_name','product_sku','product_s_desc','metadesc'
• Added date picker and other stuff to the shopper fields
• Added shopper field plugin types (for example for captchas)

Fixes:

• Removed strict standard warnings
• Areas of the code has been cleaned
• Router (enhances also the checkout)
• Storing and handling of shopper addresses (Bill-to and Ship-to)
• Added checks to shopper groups, to facilitate the prevention of products being visible to users in a wrong shopper group.
• Ordering, filters, and search in various views: orders, report, inventory view, media, ...
• Problem when creating child products in multi language shops
• Problem, with storing parent with child products being deleted or overwriting various values of the child product.
• State/country check
• Manufacturer categories, when using apply, these were not always redirecting to the correct category
• Some fixes in migrator
• Media synchroniser is now checking to ensure the media paths/urls are valid
• It should be now possible to move the page to another server and the "file for sale" are still valid
• When only one product image is available, it will not display the small little image any longer
• Refactoring in custom fields,they is now more consistency and the handling parameters are easier, orders store now $product_attribute[$selected] = $productCustom->virtuemart_custom_id; and not $product_attribute[$selected] = $selected; anylonger
• Enhanced a bit some error messages
• FE category pagination fixes
• Some fixes to the ask a question system
• Added functions, vmJsApi::js,vmJsApi::css to prevent multiple loadings from same JS libraires
• Small other js fixes (for example better compatibility with IE7)
• Authorize.net: now also checking to make sure if curl_exec function exists
• Plugin stockable variants
• Added 3^rd Info as common link to contact and manual for 3rd party developers
• And various small, other fixes

When you use VirtueMart and you like it please vote for us http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/shopping-cart/129

Download zip version (be aware it may be too big for your server configuration to use it with the joomla installer)

com_virtuemart.2.0.8c_extract_first.zip

Download tar.gz version (this is a smaller package and easier to upload, but some servers cannot handle tar.gz)

com_virtuemart.2.0.8c_extract_first.targz.zip

The most important languages are already included in the AIO, but when you need a language not already included you may find it in this package:

com_virtuemart.2.0.8c_languages_extract_first.zip

This update contains almost no new features, but a lot small bug fixes for the 2.0.4 version. There are some changes in the layouts, but only the bugfixes. So we expect no big problems.  For more security, we added a js form validator. The bugboard of the forum was quite calm last days, so we expect that the update is working fine for everyone. This installer is of course cumulativ (you can also use it to update from 2.0.0). We advice everyone to update as soon as possible.

Download VirtueMart 2.0.6

There are now some shops already for some weeks online and we proudly notice that VirtueMart 2 has a very good SEO and the products get listed very fast on top positions. Our wiki has grown again and should help to jump over the little traps http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki.

We have also now a lot more languages. 18 of them are finished, or almost finished. The translators did an amazing job, thank you guys. Read here for more information https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/virtuemart/
 
Full VM2 translations:

Brazilian (pt-BR)
Chinese (zh-CN)
Czech (cs-CZ)
Dutch (nl-NL)
Estonian (et-EE) * except PayPal 93%
French (fr-FR) is at 96% for the two main files
German (de-DE)
Greek (el-GR)
Italian (it-IT)
Lithuanian (lt-LT)
Norwegian Bokmål (nb-NO) * except PayPal 82%
Polish (pl-PL)
Portuguese (pt-PT)
Russian (ru-RU)
Slovak (sk-SK) * except PayPal 86%
Slovenian (sl-SI)
Spanish (es-ES)
Swedish (sv-SE)
Thai (th-TH)
Turkish (tr-TR)

Our future plans are:

• finish the mail to every shopper who bought the product feature
• editable orders
• write administrated multivendor
• enable the use of pricing table, for different prices per product

Download VirtueMart 2.0.6

The VirtueMart team wish happy eastern. Some days ago, a small security issue appeared. As far as we know no one got trouble due it, anyway we fixed it. The issues create possibilities for vandalism and data griefing, then actually hacking your store. Therefore we advice everyone to update to vm2.0.4 as soon as possible.
VirtueMart 2.0.4 has various fixes and small enhancements to improve the usability.

Download VirtueMart 2.0.4

I am sorry to say that we had to change a bit the layouts of the templates and that 1-2 functions have a slighty different parameters now. To help templaters and developers, we created a change log page . This page is now also displayed directly in the liveupdater. We will also going to add a rss feed in the backend.

The long time promised manuals are on the way, you can read some free english tutorials by Kerry Watson. She is a book author since a long time for internet software and in special ecommerce systems. Interesting is her opinion about virtuemart 2: "I am getting pretty comfortable with the VirtueMart. I realize the lack of documentation is one of the problems people are having with the program". The tutorials are nice written and with good illustrations: http://oscmanuals.com/virtuemart-fdm-26.html.
For the german speakers, there is already a manual written by DerHake http://www.easybay-web.de/de/joomla-handbuecher-a-software/244-shop-unter-joomla-25-und-virtuemart-20.html further more the famous book of Martin Blaszyk by the publisher addison wesley is on the way.

A lot new extensions and various templates appeared already for VirtueMart 2. Valérie and Patrick will be at the j and beyond 201 to present the VirtueMart framework, which extends the joomla framework for ecommerce purposes. Extending VirtueMart 2 becomes easier and easier.

New features, or fixed ones:
- Fixed security issue with uncasted virtuemart_userinfo_id, and two other
- Fixed security issue, it was possible to reveal address data of other shoppers

- Migrator enhanced to migrate bigger shops, code is more robust now, and faster.
- Migrator has now an option to migrate the old vm1 order_ids as vm2 order_numbers

- Advice for the safe path in the config

- Added plugin triggers for userfields (euvatid, captcha)

- Fix, enhancements for paginations, ordering

- Product edit allows to enter the final price and calculates the cost price for you
- Product edit displays all children, when it has a the customfield "dynamic child variant" attached

- Text input plugin and similar working again

- Cart is now also rounding prices
- Cart shows now values according to quantity
- Internal rounding decimals increased.
- Reduce of cart session data

- Custom orderstatus are now better useable without code hack
- Template override of plugins

- Some country, states fixes
- Some router fixes
- Js uses its own namespace now, added different fixes for better compatibility

- Waiting list by Seyi Awofadeju

- And many other small fixes, enhancements not written

Enjoy Download VirtueMart 2.0.4

Good news. The new VirtueMart store of the virtuemart core team is now opened and using the official address extensions.virtuemart.net. This store uses multivendor to give 3rd party developers an easy possibility to sell their extensions for virtuemart. The idea is that the core team can be payed to ensure the ongoing development and enhancing of the virtuemart core. Maybe we can later offer also support hours, books, hosting and others. When you want to support the project, but you dont have time to contribute, then buy something in the store to support us.

But what happened now with the VMED? At the moment the VMED is displayed in the shop http://extensions.virtuemart.net/component/sobi2 . It is not completly consistent yet. Either the shop will also provide free downloads as a kind of editors pick, or the shop is evoluting more and more to the new VMED for VM2.

What else is going on. A professional writer started to write a manual for our wiki dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki.

We have a new section in the forum for 3rd party developers and their extensions for vm2 3rd party extension VM2. You can find there a free eway plugin, jcomments for virtuemart, a redirect plugin to keep old vm1 links (just some examples). More and more payment and shipment plugins are ready. Systempay is now also in the core and maintained by the team.

The development version 2.0.3E is very matured now. The use of child variants got strongly enhanced. You can calculate your costprice according to the final price. This are mainly enhancments in the gui, else we concentrate on the various small fixes. Here the link when you want to test it VM2.0.4-RC. Personally I would use now the latest 2.0.3E aka 2.0.4-RC :-)