These days Thomas Kahl pointed me to an interesting fact: many VirtueMart-based online-shops offer coupons! Not that they know of, but you can redeem coupons and buy at a cheaper price, because the sample coupon codes are still valid. If you are not sure if you have the sample coupon codes in your store, you should immediately check it. If you find coupon codes like "test1", "test2" and such, just delete them from the coupon list. Not a security issue, but something you should be aware of...

New Sample Products

Since its first days, phpShop was shipping with Sample Products (Tools like a Chain Saw, Drill and Ladders). These Sample Products had also been imported into VirtueMart and they were never changed since then. We had the idea to build up a new "Sample Store" with different and more modern Products, but it has been very hard to make the right choice, until now-

In the Template Demo Site of Joomlart.com you can find Templates for VirtueMart, which are demo'd with a custom Sample Store Inventory (iPods, iPhone + Mobile Phones). I just asked if we could use those for our new Sample Store and they agreed.

New Template for our Bundle: JA Larix

Much better than the new Sample Products is the new standard Template for our VirtueMart eCommerce Bundle: Joomlart.com kindly allowed us to include their Larix Joomla! Template! Users will be allowed to modify it and use it on their own sites (redistribution and reselling is not allowed).

The VirtueMart eCommerce Bundle will soon be released with the new Template + sample Products, so stay tuned.

Many people have been unable to install VirtueMart 1.1.2 since its release. The common error message they were getting was:

There was an error uploading this file to the server. Unable to find install package

Just from this message it's hard to determine what the real problem could be. The main reason is that the component install file (com_virtuemart_1.1.2.j15.zip) is about 2.1 MB in size. Too large, because a maximum upload file size of only 2MB is common for most PHP configurations. If you attempt to upload a larger file, the upload fails, because larger files are not allowed.

How to get around this problem - change the maximum upload file size? There are easier solutions: don't use the web uploader...

The following blog post is for VirtueMart 1.1 templates. I did a new blog post with a list of templates for VirtueMart 2!

 

You are looking for a great and innovative Joomla! template for your new webstore? Good that you're here! You will be surprised (at least I was) how many templates for VirtueMart-based sites you can find nowadays. The following blog post will list some of the template vendors with a short description.