2BlueSolutions Developer Blog

If you want your checkout page to look like this: First, you can edit the text for you button in: /administrator/components/com_virtuemart/languages/common/english.php Search for: BUTTON_SEND_REG Whatever you put in for that value, will change the value of the button. For example, put in "Next" instead of "Send Registration" (the default value): Now, to remove the empty "Next" box as seen in the above example, it will just require a simple edit from within your Virtuemart administration page. Log into your Joomla administration page. Enter your Virtuemart administration page. Under Admin, select Manage User Fields . Find delimiter_sendregistration : Then click on the green check mark in the Published field to unpublish the field Finally, for a little bit of housekeeping, edit the following file and add some blank space before the BUTTON_SEND_REG button. /admin/components/com_virtuemart/checkout_register_form.php

This post will handle condensing the shipping address and shipping method pages. If you only offer one choice of shipping to your customer, then it is pointless to present your customer with a page that allows them to select, from one option, the type of shipping they want. It’s also just nice to condense these two pages to help reduce the number of clicks between the start and the end of the purchase process. Of course, it is still worthwhile to have your customer review their shipping address and to present them with an option to change the shipping address to something different than the bill to address. Condensing these pages will present your customer with a more streamlined checkout process that will improve your customer’s interaction with your e-commerce site. The first change needs to be applied in the VirtueMart configuration page. Log into your Joomla installation’s administrator page and then go to your VirtueMart component page. From here, click on configuration...

By default, the VirtueMart checkout process will ask for more information from your customer than is actually needed by your store.  To help reduce the form-field overload  that you customer may face when trying to purchase a product from your online store, it can help to actually remove fields that are not necessary to your business.   Do you really need to know the “company", "title", or "fax number” of a customer?  If not, then this tutorial will show you how to remove those fields. Changing the following file will impact the Billing Information and the Shipping Information (Shipping Address) forms that appear during the VirtueMart checkout process. The file you will need to edit can be found here: /administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/ps_userfield.php Search for the function getSkipFields() By default, the skipped fields are the username, password, password check, and the check for the terms of service agreement. function getSkipField...

To edit the “Add To Cart” popup that appears when you add an item to a cart in Virtuemart, there are few files that you need to know about. These are the files to know \components\com_virtuemart\themes\default\theme.js \components\com_virtuemart\js\mootools\   - contains the files for editing the appearance of the popup. To edit the appearance of the box, edit \components\com_virtuemart\js\mootools\mooPrompt.css to change the styles as well as editing the 2 images in the directory to edit how they appear as well (close box and header-background)

VirtueMart is a free piece of Shopping Cart Software made for Joomla .  It works right out of the box with a few minor tweaks, but it also allows for some major customization. There is a lot to learn about VirtueMart to get it fully customized for your needs, but if you want a free e-commerce shopping cart component for Joomla, VirtueMart is the leading candidate. To install VirtueMart is easy.  Download the latest complete package from the VirtueMart website .  Log into your Joomla adminstrative interface and upload the package that you just installed (see Joomla - Installing Components and Plugins ).  You need to unpack the file you just download because you are only going to need to initially upload the file called com_virtuemart_1.1.5.j15.zip (corresponding to the version you downloaded).

Okay, let's begin digging a little deeper into the style code of the Agora Forum .  We're going to begin with editing the horizontal bars to help control the appearance of your forum. First, let's start with making sure you have the Firebug extension installed for Firefox.  The Firebug extension will really help shed a light on how the custom style sheet affects the horizontal bars.  Once installed, you can select the row in Firefox and see what styles are being used to control the row. The one key property you are looking for is height .  It is the height of each class that we will be changing to customize the size of the horizontal bars.  What this blog post will do is show you which classes to edit in your style sheets. Let us begin with the top horizontal bar, the main menu row of Agora Forum.  This one bar is controlled by the one class div.ag_rightend found in common.css ( /joomla/components/com_agora/style ).  Adjusting the height prop...

Making The Entire Cell "Clickable" The default settings for Agora Forum requires a user to click on the text of the forum/topic name to enter that forum/topic.  This isn't necessarily the most user friendly method of accessing your forums.  One way around this is to make the entire row cell click-able and then a user just needs to click anywhere on the cell.  You can see an example of this at the Prosupplements Forum . So, what one needs to do is make the cell a click-able object and the easiest way to accomplish this is to add an "onClick" event to the table cell.  

This will be the first of a few posts describing methods for customizing Agora Forum, a free component for Joomla . Before we begin, you will need to download the Agora Forum component .  After you download you and install it, let's take a look at the files that you'll need to become familiar with.