Dreamweaver Web Design Application And Dreamweaver Web Templates

Undoubtedly Dreamweaver is the most popular website design program used these days.With increasing of attention to Dreamweaver software designers create web templates which make a process of renovating of your web site even more easier. Dreamweaver Templates are professional predesigned web site templates that can be effortlessly edited and customized according to your wants with a help of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Without doubt Dreamweaver is one of popular web design program used today. Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver) is a web development software originally created by Macromedia. Now it is developed by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. Adobe Dreamweaver is a fully-featured commercial web editor with a help of which you'll be able to create, build and manage complex web sites. It supports CSS, JavaScript, and a variety of other web-related technologies.

Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG web editor, which means that you can design your web page visually and whatever you see on the screen is what your visitors will see when they visit your site. It has features for both the beginning and advanced web page creator.

Your web site will not become "broken" every time when a new version of a web browser is released as Dreamweaver generates standards-compliant code for your webpage.

As Dreamweaver software bacomes more a more famous designers develop web templates which make a process of renovating of your web site even much more easier. Dreamweaver Templates are professional predesigned internet site templates that can be easily edited and customized according to your demands with a help of Macromedia Dreamweaver. A web template contains a preset page layout and also includes elements such as text and images. This gives you a good starting point for new web pages and blogs.

Zencart Free Shopping cart application for Ecommerce Web shop

Zen Cart is a cost-free and open source shopping cart application. Zen Cart's source code can be freely modified and even redistributed by users. Due to a small, but specific community Zen Cart get steady upgrades and maintenance.

Instalation process is rather straight forward and painless, if you have ever installed WordPress correctly this should be a cake walk.

Zen Cart is built to make it effortless to set up product listings, pricing and payment options along with act as a content management system (CMS) for all other aspects of your e-commerce website. This makes the standard tasks of managing a web site more user-friendly and simpler to understand for many who are not necessarily web designers or programmers. A really active help forum will assist you to solve any problem you may have.

Nowadays all users can personalize their website with a help of numerous Zen Cart templates offered by different websites on the net. Using of Zen Cart templates gives the site owner an opportunity to quickly improve the layout of the internet site according to their individual desires. One of the advantage of high quality Zen Cart templates is that site owners can get rid of the need to hire a web designer to modify the basic layout to suit the particular type of product presentation. Other benefit is that Zen Cart themes are easy to install.

Zen Cart Webpages

The great news for site owners - there are several places on the web where they are able to get Zen Cart templates that use their specific organization color scheme and branding. By using Zen Cart themes it allows the site to use the colors and branding connected with a certain brand or maybe an established brick and mortar retailer. It is important to have a standard branding and color scheme shared by all facets of a business enterprise to insure consumer recognition.

A website owner may decide to go and hire a web designer to give his online shop a highly customized look, this has some disadvantages however. The very fist point - it's the time needed to find the right designer with the necessary skill set. Designing for Zen Cart is rather different from designing web-sites using the more popular HTML and CSS languages. So you require to hire a designer who knows how to design specifically on the WordPress platform.

Also take into account the time that it takes to meet with the designer, have them produce a design mock up or two, and then make revisions before final design approval. If time is of the essence then using a pre-configured top quality Zen Cart Themes is certainly the route to take.

The upside to hiring a designer to give your webpage a custom look is that you will have a unique design that helps your web site and business be prominent among the hundreds of standard web sites in your market niche. Your web site is often the first opinion a customer has of your business, and there's no other chance to make a first impression.

A professionally designed website that is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate instills confidence in your products and helps keep customers on your web-site, increasing the odds of them making a purchase.

Un poco sobre plantillas web

Hay un gran número de diseñadores y desarrolladores que ofrecen sus proyectos a través de plantillas web. El mercado es muy competitivo y lleno de personas y grupos de diseñadores de talento. Para los clientes esto significa la calidad alta de plantillas a precios módicos o aún productos absolutamente gratuitos.

A menudo se comparan las plantillas gratuitas con las plantillas no gratuitas en aspecto de calidad de presentación y apariencia. Plantilla gratuita es una opción buena para los clientes que no desean perder su dinero. En general la calidad no se depende del costo de producto.

Con tantos especialistas que necesitan una oportunidad de entrar en el mercado, hay miles de plantillas entregadas gratis. Estas plantillas gratuitas frecuentemente tienen la misma calidad que las plantillas superiores no gratuitas o plantillas creadas especialmente para algún sitio web. Plantillas gratuitas ofrecen una posibilidad de desarrollar un sitio web que se ve muy bien completamente gratis.

El punto flaco principal de cualquier plantilla es que otros sitios pueden tener un aspecto idéntico o parecido a su sitio web (pero es muy difícil encontrar este sitio o sitios en la web).

La verdad es que con independencia del coste, las plantillas son en verdad la mejor manera de desarrollar una presentación brillante en la Web.

Prestashop - A Free Professional e-commerce Shopping Cart

Prestashop shopping cart is written in PHP and is glad to run on many of the common operating systems available today, such as Windows, Mac, or Linux. The solution works closely with either Apache or IIS servers and also utilizes MySQL for data storage. This computer software presents a large amount of useful features including item search, receipt printing, and purchasing out of stock items. Other advantage is that this shopping cart come completely equipped with advanced reporting and customer management functions.

While the Prestashop platform is a viable way of doing business online, the question of setting up a web page running Prestashop solution must be addressed. There are essentially two options a web-site owner can decide between. One is going the route of custom development and the other is to use prepackaged and fully developed PrestaShop templates. Custom development can be a complicated and time consuming process. A web professional must be managed over the course of the project and the end result is never ensured to be what was originally intended. In addition it can also be very expensive .

PrestaShop templates are a gallery of themes that are designed to create a PrestaShop website quickly and easily. The great benefit is that they're much more cheaper than development and come fully packaged and ready to perform. At this time there is a lot of fantastic PrestaShop templates available for purchase, every has a unique design and numerous features. Use Prestashop e-commerce solution and a PrestaShop template and you will get a lot of benefits for your online business for a low cost or absolutely free.

Important information About Prestashop application and Prestashop Templates

A cost-effective method of creating an online e-commerce presence is through the use of Prestashop e-commerce shopping cart and PrestaShop themes. Prestashop is an open source software that is freely available. Prestashop solution is the best solution for web owners planning to keep costs and time requirements down.

E-commerce has become an extremely effective way to do business in the modern marketplace. More and more people are flocking to the Internet to do business through shopping as well as other commercial activities. A mark of a respected business is a professional and smartly designed web experience for potential and returning customers. If you need to get more customers - a web presence is a good way for this.

To be able to get the e-commerce internet site, a web site owner must first decide how to go about it. Presently there are a lot of various commercial software companies that provide business owners large amount of packages that can provide a solution to their online needs. These are often times high-priced and therefore out of the reach of small and many medium sized business groups. From the perspective of a business owner wanting to get into e-commerce, this may present an obstacle that can lock them out of a possibility. In addition to the expensive, many software companies have a strict licensing agreement that must be followed to prevent the risk of software threat and copyright infringement.

A strategic alternative to these software companies, is to utilize products that are open source and free to use. So such alternative is Prestashop open source solution. This e-commerce shopping cart application was developed by a dedicated team of professionals from all over the world. Originally it was made in Paris and the first release was in 2007. After this time Prestashop became the most well-liked platform for online buisness.

Porque elegir plantillas web?

Los diseГ±adores de todo el mundo ofrecen productos y servicios para las personas que buscan un sitio web de calidad. Una de las maneras de realizar esto es distribuir las plantillas.

Como una opciГіn rГЎpida y sencilla del problema de diseГ±o y desarrollo web, plantilla web puede ofrecer una lista de ventajas. AquГ­ puede ver estas ventajas:

• Plantillas Flash estГЎn listas para la carga inmediata al servidorse puede inmediatamente cargar las plantillas al servidor;
• es sencillo personalizar plantillas por medio de las instrucciones detalladas enviadas junto con los archivos de plantilla web;
• se puede realizar todas las actualizaciones y modificaciones de sus sitio web basado en una plantilla dentro de pocos minutos;
• sin distinciГіn de la manera de implementaciГіn del sitio, hay plantillas creadas para satisfacer todas las necesidades de su sitio web;
• actualmente los proveedores de plantillas ofrecen la calidad muy alta de sus diseГ±os a precios bastante econГіmicos o bajos;
• hay plantillas gratuitas (Las plantillas gratuitas son frecuentemente comparadas con las plantillas superiores en tГ©rminos de calidad de presentaciГіn y apariencia. Plantillas gratuitas son la mejor opciГіn para aquellos propietarios de sitios web que no quieren gastar dinero para diseГ±ar un sitio web).

De esa manera, como una soluciГіn econГіmica, rГЎpida y sencilla plantilla web es lo mejor.

Find out how to Make Use Of Your Web Design Blog

If you have a web design related site or blog you might like to discover the ways to monetize it. There are many of ways how to make money from your webblog: advertising, freelance writing, 3rd party advertising platforms, involving friends, becoming a teacher and of course web templates affiliate programs. Find all the information about web design affiliate programs and other web alternatives for you.

Do you know that you are a drug addict person? Your special drug is information. The key advantage of it is not having any side effects. Every day our whole world is getting more addicted to the hottest news. We desire to have all recent news from financial markets, politics, environment, culture and so on. Despite the fact that this social and technological phenomenon keeps evolving every minute (with creating new accounts on social networks and launching new web blogs) it is too early to say about complete qualitative growth of this phenomenon.

Informational boom in general upsets with increase of spam, nevertheless web design blogosphere gives us hope for the best. Currently we want to talk about such important question as– how you can actually monetize your web-design blog. If you believe that it is not so easy – well we’ve got something for you. Modern marketing technologies are giving more and more possibilities to earn income from your design blog. Using some of these ways will help you to monetize your project, provide deeper interaction with your clients (visitors) and certainly get unvalued experience in internet marketing world. And keep in mind that being a good blogger - doesn’t necessarily mean being financially successful. So, below you will find out about some helpful ways to earn some money from your design–related blog.

Advertising - what to choose?

Banners and ads

Selling banner ads is the quickest solution to monetize your blog. Without doubt, before starting to sell ads space you should know that Page Views are important part of this process and that the more pageviews you have the better your results in selling banners will be.

3rd Party Advertising Platforms

There’s an advertiser, a publisher and a platform that is a middleman working for a commission. These are classic these days – using a service for example Google AdSense, BuySellAds or some other program, which will take the work out of managing your advertisers. Now quite a lot of web designers present many design-related products on their blogs. It is one of the most powerful social groups in the internet. So, why do not you try it? Things are so simple: big traffic=clicks=profits.

Affiliate marketing programs

Today you can find a great amount of various affiliate programs presented by numerous wed-design companies. Selling design themes or templates, promoting stock photos or reselling hosting can improve your income quickly. Offering customization services for the products that you are reselling can grant you extra advantages ( web hosting reselling would give triple combo).

Be a teacher

With a help of such present day communication technologies as Google Wave, Skype and others, you can offer online webinars and tutorials. Sell your knowledges to your visitors and get pleasure from teaching!

Freelance Writing

The most widely used solution to earn money over net is to write articles. So if you are confident in your ability as a copywriter, don't waste the time - go-ahead and look for potential clients. The price depends on the theme, words density and quality. Writing articles for other blogs is really advantageous because you can improve your copywriting experience and apply it at your own project. Just remember that this occupation requires mobility simply because you have to look for clients by yourself.

Job Boards

Speaking about experience of Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall and Mashable, we can state that such technique will be an extremely useful resource both for visitors-clients and visitors-freelancers. This flexible way enables you to work together with your colleagues as well as gain perfect reputation among the clients.

Invite Your Friends

Do you have a friend that have a talent and earns for living by developing some applications or coding and so on? Now it is time to make business together. You can simply present his items at your blog. This would be paying business for both of you guys and with the proper marketing approach you’ll have the army of satisfied clients.

VirtueMart Template for Flower Store

Florist's VirtueMart Template

Flower Store is a place for lots of intimate minds. To enhance your client pool in this area and make your e-commerce activity extremely clear and hooking, get top-quality VirtueMart design to use this smooth and dainty template style for your fortunate Flower on-line store.

To use a rich set of VirtueMart advantages to your distinct project, you will be needing the certain array of software:

• Adobe Photoshop CS+;
• Adobe Dreamweaver 8+ (or any php-editor);
• Joomla! 1.5.x;
• Virtuemart 1.1.4;
• For uncompressing a template ZIP package:
  • WinZip 9+ (Windows);
  • Stuffit Expander 10+ (Mac)

Do not forget that just before acquiring this Joomla VirtueMart Template for Flower shop, you could download a sample of this model to explore or improve your knowledge and feel all the advantages of the present VirtueMart design item.

With VirtueMart shopping cart stately brought by TemplateMonster specialist designers crew youll receive a rich set of features, including easy user interface integrated to Joomla, an ability to add pictures and data files so that to deliver much more info about the readily available flower products and extend your online shop with various modules and categories.

>Joomla content management system (CMS) from the begining

Joomla content management system was the result of a fork of Mambo by the Joomla CMS development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who established a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to create funding for the project and protect it from lawsuits. The Joomla! development team claimed that quite a lot of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the Mambo Steering Committee, key stake-holders opinion was neglected and, which is even more important, new foundation added to provisions that violated main open source values.

The Joomla CMS development team created a site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, web developers, internet designers and the online community in general. The project leader Andrew Eddie, also known as "MasterChief" wrote an open letter to the public which got shown up on the announcements section of the public community forum at mamboserver.com.

A little more than one thousand people registered as members of the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, almost all encouraged and supported the idea, and the internet site received the slashdot effect subsequently. Miro Boss Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an document referred to as "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro". This event resulted in debate within the open source software community about the meaning of "open source". Forums at many other open source projects had been active with postings for and against both sides.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams had been re-organized, and the community grew even larger. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement. The SFLC continue to supply legal guidance to the Joomla! project.

On August 18, 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The core team pointed out that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The core team at some point picked a name that was not on the list of suggested names provided by the community. On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla!", was introduced. The name is the English transliteration of the Arabic word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole", as well as "sentence" (as in, phrase).

On September 6, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, brand guidelines, a brand manual, and a set of logo resources had been then published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.

Joomla! (Joomla 1..) was released on September 16, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which, itself, was combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes.

Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.

On October 27, 2008, PACKT Publishing announced Johan Janssens the "Most Valued Person" (MVP) for his work as one of the lead developers of the 1.5 Joomla Framework and Architecture. In 2009 Louis Landry received the "Most Valued Person" award for his role as Joomla architect and progress coordinator.

Joomla! version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008.

At the end of October 2009 a second alpha version of 1.6 was presented for testing .

By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report published the conclusion that Joomla! is the web's most popular open source content management system. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of end users.

Joomla and Ecommerce - Is This Possible

Living With Joomla

Joomla can be installed manually from source code on a system running a web server which supports PHP applications. Manual installation generally requires extra time and practical knowledge compared to other alternatives such as installing Joomla from a package management system or using a TurnKey Joomla appliance which pre-integrates Joomla and its dependencies as a ready-to-use system.

E-commerce Today

What is Ecommerce

Electronic commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

Ecommerce Products

According to eMarketer the biggest product categories include:

• Information
• Home Electronics
• Gifts and flowers
• Travel services
• Entertainment
• Music
• Computer products (hardware, software, accessories)
• Tickets
• Financial Services
• Toys
• Apparel
• Books

ecommerce vs off-line Commerce

How is eCommerce better than conventional commerce

• Larger catalogs
• Improved customer interactions
• The ability to build an order over several days
• The ability to compare prices between multiple vendors easily
• The ability to search large catalogs easily
• The ability to configure products and see actual prices
• Larger purchases per transaction
• The ability to easily build complicated custom orders
• Lower transaction costs

Ecommerce and Shopping Carts

A shopping cart (also known as e-commerce software, e-store software, online store software or storefront software) is a software package that works as an engine for online store's catalog and ordering process. Typically, a shopping cart is the interface between a company's site and its deeper infrastructure, allowing consumers to choose products; review what they have selected; make necessary alterations or additions; and purchase the merchandise.

Virtuemart Ecommerce Solution

VirtueMart is the major GNU licensed web store solution for the incredibly popular Joomla! Framework. VirtueMart Shopping Cart Bundle is not an official release of the Joomla! Project.

Virtuemart Joomla Shopping Cart Extension Features

VirtueMart Shopping Cart supports an unlimited number of products and categories, with products able to be assigned to multiple categories. It also permits the sale of downloadable products, and offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turned off. VirtueMart supports multiple prices for a single product, based around shopper groups or a quantity range, and permits the use of a variety of different payment gateways.

Because VirtueMart Shopping Cart is an open source e-commerce solution all the application code is openly visible in PHP. This allows PHP developers to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition VirtueMart itself offers simplified templates ( called 'fly pages' in VirtueMart) structure that allows various shopping and cart page(s) to be edited as standard html and css.

Notably new to VirtueMart 1.1.0 was the inclusion of the ability to quickly change themes for category, product, checkout and cart pages.

VirtueMart Hosting Requirements

As Virtuemart Online Shop Solution is only a plugin for Joomla! / Mambo, it has the same system requirements, which are currently:

• Joomla! 1.0.x or Mambo (>= 4.5.1) recommended: Joomla! 1.5.x (VirtueMart will soon only work with 1.5 or above).
• PHP 4.2.x or above - recommended: PHP 4.4.x
• MySQL 3.23.x or above -recommended: MySQL 4.0.x
• Apache 1.13.19 or above -recommended: Apache 2.x

Several other required supporting libraries or extensions include MySQL, XML and Zlib support built into PHP. Support for https (openSSL) and cURL is recommended.

Understanding VirtueMart Joomla Templates

Template for Virtuemart is the glorious triad of outstanding design, premium quality and brilliant solution for eCommerce activity. This is your lucky chance to update or start your own Internet shop that grants possibilities of convenient intercommunication with all of your clients and accents out distinguished appearance of your company's image.

Ecommerce and CMS

So, what is Web Content Management System?

A content management system (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to:

• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Control access to data, based on user roles. User roles define what information each user can view or edit
• Improve communication between users
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data

A Web Content Management System (WCM, WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions.

The software provides authoring (and other) tools developed to make it possible for people with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to produce and manage content with relative ease.

Web content management systems began to be formally designed as commercial software products in the mid 1990s. In the mid 2000s, the web content management market became a fragmented market as a plethora of new providers emerged to complement the traditional vendors.

Best CMS is Joomla

Joomla can be installed manually from source code on a system running a web server which supports PHP applications. Manual installation generally requires more time and practical experience as compared to other alternatives such as installing Joomla from a package management system or using a TurnKey Joomla appliance which pre-integrates Joomla and its dependencies as a ready-to-use system.

Enter Virtuemart Online Shop Solution

VirtueMart is a fully featured open-source e-commerce package for Joomla. It will provide an effective Internet store solution for most businesses.

VirtueMart Features

Virtuemart Online Store Solution supports an unlimited number of products and categories, with products able to be assigned to multiple categories. It also permits the sale of downloadable products, and offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turned off. VirtueMart supports multiple prices for a single product, based around shopper groups or a quantity range, and permits the use of a variety of different payment gateways.

Because Virtuemart Joomla Ecommerce Solution is an open source e-commerce solution all the application code is openly visible in PHP. This allows PHP developers to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition VirtueMart itself offers simplified templates ( called 'fly pages' in VirtueMart) structure that allows various shopping and cart page(s) to be edited as standard html and css.

Notably new to VirtueMart 1.1.0 was the inclusion of the ability to quickly change themes for category, product, checkout and cart pages.

VirtueMart Hosting Requirements

As VirtueMart is only a plugin for Joomla! / Mambo, it has the same system requirements, which are currently:

• Joomla! 1.0.x or Mambo (>= 4.5.1) recommended: Joomla! 1.5.x (VirtueMart will soon only work with 1.5 or above).
• PHP 4.2.x or above - recommended: PHP 4.4.x
• MySQL 3.23.x or above -recommended: MySQL 4.0.x
• Apache 1.13.19 or above -recommended: Apache 2.x

Several other required supporting libraries or extensions include MySQL, XML and Zlib support built into PHP. Support for https (openSSL) and cURL is recommended.

VirtueMart Joomla Templates Explained

Now confess to yourself, if you are going to fall for free overused underdesigned Virtuemart Joomla Templates or a premium Virtuemart themes created, brushed and polished by web design professionals? You get what you pay for.

Virtuemart Joomla Shopping Cart Extension

VirtueMart is the major GNU licensed storefront solution for the incredibly popular Joomla! Framework. VirtueMart eCommerce Bundle is not an official release of the Joomla! Project.

VirtueMart Features

VirtueMart supports an unlimited number of products and categories, with products able to be assigned to multiple categories. It also permits the sale of downloadable products, and offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turned off. VirtueMart supports multiple prices for a single product, based around shopper groups or a quantity range, and permits the use of a variety of different payment gateways.

Because Virtuemart Online Shop Solution is an open source e-commerce solution all the application code is openly visible in PHP. This allows PHP developers to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition VirtueMart itself offers simplified templates ( called 'fly pages' in VirtueMart) structure that allows various shopping and cart page(s) to be edited as standard html and css.

Notably new to VirtueMart 1.1.0 was the inclusion of the ability to quickly change themes for category, product, checkout and cart pages.

VirtueMart Requirements

As Virtuemart Shopping Cart Program is only a plugin for Joomla! / Mambo, it has the same system requirements, which are currently:

• Joomla! 1.0.x or Mambo (>= 4.5.1) recommended: Joomla! 1.5.x (VirtueMart will soon only work with 1.5 or above).
• PHP 4.2.x or above - recommended: PHP 4.4.x
• MySQL 3.23.x or above -recommended: MySQL 4.0.x
• Apache 1.13.19 or above -recommended: Apache 2.x

Several other required supporting libraries or extensions include MySQL, XML and Zlib support built into PHP. Support for https (openSSL) and cURL is recommended.

Virtuemart Online Store Solution

VirtueMart is a GNU licensed storefront solution for Joomla content management system.

Virtuemart Ecommerce Solution Features

Virtuemart Shopping Cart Application supports an unlimited number of products and categories, with products able to be assigned to multiple categories. It also permits the sale of downloadable products, and offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turned off. VirtueMart supports multiple prices for a single product, based around shopper groups or a quantity range, and permits the use of a variety of different payment gateways.

Because VirtueMart is an open source e-commerce solution all the application code is openly visible in PHP. This allows PHP developers to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition VirtueMart itself offers simplified templates ( called 'fly pages' in VirtueMart) structure that allows various shopping and cart page(s) to be edited as standard html and css.

Notably new to VirtueMart 1.1.0 was the inclusion of the ability to quickly change themes for category, product, checkout and cart pages.

VirtueMart Hosting Requirements

As Virtuemart Ecommerce Solution is only a plugin for Joomla! / Mambo, it has the same system requirements, which are currently:

• Joomla! 1.0.x or Mambo (>= 4.5.1) recommended: Joomla! 1.5.x (VirtueMart will soon only work with 1.5 or above).
• PHP 4.2.x or above - recommended: PHP 4.4.x
• MySQL 3.23.x or above -recommended: MySQL 4.0.x
• Apache 1.13.19 or above -recommended: Apache 2.x

Several other required supporting libraries or extensions include MySQL, XML and Zlib support built into PHP. Support for https (openSSL) and cURL is recommended.