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.