Joomla! Shop with VirtueMart

Customer: Website design consultancy based in The Netherlands

Business Case:  The customer required a software development partner to implement their own designs into a working website. The existing website, implemented using html and css, required a high level of maintenance to ensure that the online catalogue of products was kept up to date and accurate. The new website was required to implement a content management system (CMS) that would significantly reduce both the cost and the timescales of maintaining a large online catalogue.

This maintenance saving was particularly important because the website and the product catalogue were to be presented in at least 4 languages, Dutch, English, French and German.

To further assist in the maintenance of the product catalogue, the website was required to support an SQL import utility, that would allow administrators to update information directly from the production database. The website was also required to incorporate an easy path to upgrade the website from a catalogue to a shop without redesign or implementation.

Solution: Sitex decided to use Joomla! for this website development because it has a large selection of readily available add-on modules and presents the website editors with an easy to use back-end. Sitex implemented the customers design into a Joomla! template that works in all major web browsers including FireFox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Notable features of this template include drop down menus and randomly selected banners and corporate slogans (in language of the website viewer). Sitex implemented the multi-lingual support using the Joomla! component Joom!Fish.

The online catalogue, and future online shop, was implemented using the Joomla! component VirtueMart. This component was customized using JavaScript to support information pop-ups, small tooltips that would appear when the mouse moves over a product or category image. Further customization was carried out to display additional product images on the product flyer pages. A further modification was made to import data from an external SQL database, ensuring that product names and prices would remain correct.

Sitex created a Joomla! module that displays useful information to the user when a 404 page not found error is met. This module created and displayed a list of alternative URLs to the user that are similar to the URL that was not found.

Sitex added Search Engine Friendly URLs to the website including the catalogue by integrating the JoomSEF component from Artio. A google maps plug-in was also incorporated to show the address of the physical store.

Sitex also created a custom Joomla! feed page to be able to show feeds from a WordPress blog and images from Flickr on the same page.

Tools and Technologies:

Joomla! 1.5 CMS, Joom!Fish, VirtueMart, JoomSEF and more ...

PHP, MySQL, LAMP, Javascript 

Screenshots:

Due to client confidentiality, we are not able to show any screenshots from this project.